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— />•' 



THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 




IVilliam Henry Brook field 

From a portrait by Samuel Laurence 



THE CAMBRIDGE 
''APOSTLES '\ 






L' 



^ 

By 

FRANCES M. BROOKFIELD 



\ 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-157 Fifth Avenue 
1906 






BUTLER & Tanner, 

The selwood Printing works, 

frome, and London. 



^Ofp^ 



.e ) 



PREFACE 

I HAVE not attempted in this book to write a complete 
or collective history of the Cambridge '* Apostles." 
Such a work might prove of interest to individuals 
but hardly to the world at large. Nor have I pre- 
sumed to pick out from the register of that distin- 
guished band the twelve indisputabty the most bril- 
liant and renowned. Such would be an invidious and 
pretentious task, and in any case beyond my powers. 
All I have tried to do is to give a few sketches of such 
of the " Apostles " as were friends of the late Wilham 
Henry Brookfield, of whom accordingly I have family 
traditions and literary records. I was pleased and 
flattered to find, after having made my selection, that 
it tallied with the list of illustrious " Apostles " men- 
tioned by the late Lord Houghton on the occasion of 
the opening of the new Cambridge " Union " in 1866. 
In my selection of letters from these eminent men 
I have endeavoured to choose those which should 
reveal, not so much the intellectual mission of the 
man as the humanity of the intellectual missionary. 
For remarkable as were the mental powers of each one 
of this dazzling group, it is not his genius which strikes 
one first and most forcibly, but his greatness of heart, 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

his extraordinary capacity for loving and need of being 
loved. 

For helpful assistance in this work I am greatly 
indebted to the generous co-operation of Mrs. Venables, 
the Misses Spedding, the Misses Blakesley, Miss Judith 
Merivale and Mrs. C. B. Johnson (author of William 
Bodham Donne and his Friends) . Also to Maj or-General 
Sir Frederick Maurice, K.C.B., Major-General Sterling, 
Colonel Kemble, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, W. L. 
Courtney, Esq., Messrs. Methuen ; to the Rev. C. B. 
Donne and W. Mowbray Donne, Esq., who lent me 
the valuable letters in their possession, and to the author 
of Charles Lowden, who kindly permitted me to make 
use of his Life and Memorials of Archbishop Trench, 
to whom and to all I tender my truly grateful thanks. 

Frances M. Brookfield. 
High Wycombe, 

October, 1906. 



CONTENTS 



CRAP 
I. 


The " Apostles " 


PAOB 
I 


11. 


William Henry Brookfield 


20 


III. 


The Friend of the " Apostles " . 


42 


IV. 


The Friend of the "Apostles" (continued) . 


63 


V. 


Joseph William Blakesley . 


84 


VI. 


Charles Buller 


107 


VII. 


Arthur Henry Hallam . . . . 


123 


VIII. 


John Mitchell Kemble . . . . 


159 


IX. 


Henry Lushington 


188 


X. 


Frederick Denison Maurice 


201 


XI. 


Richard Monckton Milnes . . . . 


227 


XII. 


James Spedding 


252 


XIII. 


John Sterling 


383 


XIV. 


Alfred Tennyson 


308 


XV. 


Richard Chenevix Trench . 


331 


XVI. 


George Stovin Venables 


347 




Index 


365 




ix 





INDEX TO ILLUSTRATIONS 



William Henry Brookfield 
Joseph William Blakesley 
Charles Buller . 
Arthur H. Hall am 
John Mitchell Kemble 
Frederick Denison Maurice 
Richard Monckton Milnes . 
James Spedding . 
John Sterling 
Alfred Tennyson 
Richard Chenevix Trench . 
George Stovin Venables 



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108 


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124 


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160 


>> 


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202 


>» 


»» 


228 


»» 


»» 


252 


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284 


»> 


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308 


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332 


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348 



XI 



THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 
CHAPTER I 

THE " APOSTLES " 

The first ripe taste of manhood's best delights, 
Knowledge imbibed, while mind and heart agree, 
In sweet belated talk on winter nights, 
With friends, whom growing time keeps dear to me, — 

(MONCKTON MiLNES). 

Brothers, who up Reason's hill 

Advance with hopeful cheer, 
O ! loiter not, those heights are chill. 

As chill as they are clear ; 
And still restrain your haughty gaze. 

The loftier that ye go, 
Remembering distance leaves a haze 

On all that lies below. 

{Ihid.) 

The third and fourth decades of the nineteenth 
century found together at one time at our great 
universities an extraordinary number of exceptionally 
gifted men : men of keen wit, of sohd thought, of 
brilHant achievement. But while we acclaim these 
giants of the past, we are constrained to compare 
them with the pygmies of the present. By compari- 
son, the undergraduate of to-day appears dull, 
mediocre and unpromising. There is excellent and 

abundant reason to rejoice over and take pride in 
I— (2318 ) 1 



2 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

the rare talents of the youth of that bygone era — 
for they glowed with energy, they set forth with 
steadfast purpose, and they arrived long ago at their 
goal. Yet parents and guardians in those times had 
their day of doubt. It is we, of the next generation, 
who can appreciate their children's careers — just as 
it is our descendants who must sit in judgment on 
our contemporaries. The tide of thought in a great 
university is constantly flowing, although, like the 
stream of a wide river, its course is hardly visible ; 
imperceptibly, however, it seems to have made further 
progress at Cambridge during the past century than 
during any similar period of time. Each generation 
has had its distinctive features — mental, psychical 
and social. In each " set " the highest mettled has 
struck his spark which in due time has glowed into a 
guiding luminary. May we not hope that in the 
apparent dullness of to-day there lurks here and there 
an unperceived ember which will one day burst like- 
wise into flame ? The light of genius seems certainly 
more diffused to-day than it was seventy years ago. 
We are no longer dazzled by a few blazing beacons, 
but illumined by rows upon rows of twinkhng lanterns. 
Still, one of these may continue to burn more and 
more brightly as his fellows flicker out, until he shall 
beam upon a generation to come with as brilliant an 
effulgence as was shed by the shining hghts of " those 
dawn-golden times." 

There was in the air of Cambridge, in the spring of 
the nineteenth century, a spirit of intellectual free- 



THE "APOSTLES" 3 

masonry, a tendency of bright wits to recognize each 
other and to drift into sodalities more or less informal 
and undefined. Some of these remained mere " sets " 
— that is to say, groups of friends united by nothing 
more than a community of likes and dislikes. Some 
developed into " societies " with a definite object — 
the pursuit of some special quarry or the riding of 
some particular hobby ; but the most important, 
distinguished and lasting result of this gregarious 
tendency of sympathetic souls was the constitution of 
a fellowship commonly known by its cant name of 
" The Apostles." 

The conditions of life at that time were such that 
they caused men who were in possession of greater 
than ordinary ability to float towards each other ; to 
become, by right of a community of interests, fast 
and abiding friends ; and the friendship that existed 
between a certain set of undergraduates at St. John's in 
the year 1820 — men of high promise and higher hopes 
— undoubtedly led to the forming of this distinguished 
" Society." Attracted towards one another by an 
equality of mental attainments and similar tastes in 
Hterature, the thoughts of each acted and reacted 
upon those of his fellows until all were fired with the 
same intellectual desire. This took the form of a 
common craving for further investigation than was 
permitted by the opportunities given by the Univer- 
sity, into higher philosophy. In order to achieve this, 
they, with the venturesomeness of youth and a pro- 
digious beUef in self — and also^ be it said, in face of 



4 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

the fact that they were looked on coldjy by more 
conventional minds — formed themselves into a society 
for the writing of essays upon subjects on which they 
required larger and wider information. To this end, 
and to promote and provoke discussion upon their 
favourite themes, they arranged that members should 
meet together once a week for these objects. 

Henry Tomhnson (afterwards Bishop of Gibraltar) 
was of this gifted band — and one of the founders of 
the Society — which was called " The Cambridge Con- 
versazione Society," which name remains its title to this 
day ; the more familiar designation, " The Apostles," 
having been originally applied to them in a spirit of 
banter. A member of the Society might belong to 
any college, but he was bound to have more than 
ordinary talents, and as well a distinct and original 
personality. Once elected, a new member would 
urge the claims of his own close friend to be the next ; 
he himself having been raised to the dignity by others 
already his friends. 

The common idea has been that membership of this 
sodahty of itself bestowed glory, but that was not so, 
at least in early days. In its prime, from the year 
1 824-1840, each member took to the Society his 
laurels ready plaited, and it was the individual 
brilliancy of its members which caused this Society to 
shine so brightly. 

The " Cambridge Conversazione Society " carried 
on its work with more or less success, until it was 
observed that Trinity was giving to it all its best 



THE ^^ APOSTLES" 5 

talents; accordingly, its meetings thereafter were 
held in that college. Then began its golden 
era ; and then it was that its members (limited to 
twelve) came in gentle raillery to be called " Apostles/' 
a term meekly — and, according to some of themselves 
— appreciatively accepted ; and which was met by a 
sinking of all allusion to their high distinction when 
in the company of those not of the '* Society." The 
eminence achieved in after life by almost every one 
of those early Cambridge " Apostles " shows that 
collectively they must have possessed, besides their 
talent and genius, a keen and critical perception of 
promise very remarkable in men so young. The 
most stringent of their rules enacted that the ab- 
solute freedom of thought and speech they one and 
all desired should be respected by every member and 
in all circumstances ; and, in order that no one of 
them in his ideas or convictions should in any way 
be trammelled or hampered, minutes of their meetings 
were never published. 

The life of an " Apostle " at this time was, as 
Carlyle says, " an ardently speculative and talking 
one." The method of the young enthusiasts was first 
of all to strip tegument from tegument, until the very 
heart of their subject was laid bare ; next, to reveal 
to the world the secrets their scalpels had brought to 
light. The ambitions expressed and the business per- 
formed at their assemblies give a lively impression of 
the ebullitions of a group of congenial spirits on the same 
intellectual plane, proud with the florescence of youth, 



6 THE CAMBRIDGE ^^ APOSTLES" 

which in a first ordering of life for self had gained 
what it required — in this case, opportunity for the 
expression of seething thought and new-born specu- 
lation. 

The usual procedure was to meet every Saturday 
night in the rooms of the one whose turn it was to read 
the essay; essays being read by each of them in regular 
succession. After preliminary precautions such as the 
"sporting" of the "oak" or outer door, as well as the 
locking of the inner one, the host of the evening would 
provide his guests with light refreshments, which in- 
variably included coffee and anchovies on toast — called 
" whales," even in those days — after which he gave 
to them his own thoughts — frank and free. Then the 
others replied, agreed, disproved, criticized, as con- 
science or as humour dictated. 

There was no prim ordering of the day ; each 
" Apostolic " essayist read his best, and polished his 
material under the encouraging murmurs or the 
sympathetic ejaculations of friends as he went along ; 
while each of his hearers imbibed the information given 
him at his ease, lounging in easy chairs, on sofa or 
hearthrug, until discussion became heated or interest- 
ing enough to demand a more vigilant attitude. 

Theological and political investigations, as became the 
time and the place, abounded ; sometimes the theme 
was purely metaphysical, sometimes scientific or 
literary; but each and every subject which they took 
and pondered over was discussed, criticized and 
settled fearlessly for themselves. 



THE '^APOSTLES" 7 

Where once we held debate, a band 
Of youthful friends, on mind and art, 
And labour, and the changing mart. 
And all the framework of the land ; 

When one would aim an arrow fair, 
But send it slackly from the string ; 
And one would pierce an outer ring, 
And one an inner, here and there ; 

And last the master-bowman, he 
Would cleave the mark, 

is Tennyson's masterly description of these intellectual 
assemblies. 

For a period poetry ruled supreme, and this perhaps 
was their favourite subject ; all of them being poets 
or having, at all events, the poetic temperament. 
But on poetry, as on every topic chosen, they turned 
their searchlight of philosophy and reason. Landor 
and Southey inspired them and gave them zest in 
criticism ; for some time they lived under Shelley's 
influence ; they brought Keats to the knowledge of 
mankind ; and Coleridge and Wordsworth, both 
beloved by them, gave them painful as well as joyful 
moments. They would have only that which they con- 
sidered to be the highest ; they dismissed with disdain 
everything that seemed to them to savour of humbug or 
of " pill " ; and, however heated their " instructive 
hours " sometimes became, they permitted no differ- 
ence of opinion, however wide, to shake the soHd and 
steady affection which existed between them. This 
affectionate interest and friendly intercourse between 
the "Apostles" was once, by one of themselves, likened 



8 THE CAMBRIDGE ^^ APOSTLES" 

to the description of friendship given so long before 
by St. Augustine : 

" To talk and laugh with mutual concessions, to 
read pleasant books ; to jest and to be solemn, to 
dissent from each other without offence, to teach one 
another somewhat, or somewhat to learn — to expect 
those absent with impatience and embrace their re- 
turn with joy." 

But they were all through and first of all '* modern " 
and modern with the first bloom and freshness of the 
changing times upon them ; therefore they took and 
used, whenever and wherever they found it, the 
thought which seemed freshest and newest and which 
best blent with their own. Niebiihr for them was a 
god, who for a lengthy period formed all their senti- 
ments. Bentham, Mill, and others took them in their 
turn and whirled their thoughts this way and that ; 
these intellectual bouts leaving them sometimes con- 
fused and sometimes dissatisfied. Yet with such 
strength of character were these " Apostles " girt, 
that they emerged from their wrestHngs with these 
Titans with but little loss of individuality. 

Above their ardent yearnings to clear the abstruse, 
and to make the world see with their eyes — which 
endeavours, after all, were the end and aim of the 
''Society " — must be placed the wish of all of them that 
each should use for all it was worth the talent en- 
trusted to him ; that he should shape a straight and 
definite course and walk that course directly and in 
satisfaction to success. 



THE ^^ APOSTLES" 9 

In just presumption many of them attempted the 
fulfilment of this pleasing expectation, making their 
effort in advantageous circumstances, surrounded by 
minds great enough to give them a sense of their own 
greatness, and encouraged as men in this life were 
seldom encouraged. Were there not in these days, to 
mention only a few of them, Trench, Sterling, Alford, 
Maurice, Kemble, Spedding, Buller, Blakesley, Milnes, 
Henry and Edmund Lushington, Alfred and Frederick 
Tennyson, Venables, Allen, Garden, Thompson, Meri- 
vale, Hallam, Heath, Donne, Monteith, Thirlwall ? 
Was there ever of late centuries, at one given time, so 
formidable a phalanx of talent ? Does it not compel 
comparison with the similar rush that came with the 
last years of Elizabeth ? and do not our later and not 
lesser lights meet on common ground with Spencer, 
Marlowe, Donne, Sidney, and Jonson ? 

Our " Apostles " could have dispensed, had they 
chosen, with authority and precedent and the opinions 
of the ancients. They had enough of contemporary 
material on which to form their opinions and whet 
their critical curiosity ; they had their own friends' 
burning thoughts and robust methods to attack or ac- 
claim — thoughts and methods born often of their own 
inner consciousness and fostered by friendly comment. 

The dissimilarity in style of the " Apostles " adds 
to the interest of the Society. The primary aim of the 
Society had been, it is true, to associate together those 
of the loftiest and solidest thought ; but its members 
who possessed these attributes in the highest perfection 



10 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

were those who demanded admittance for friends of 
gayer and lighter vein ; men who had cultivated 
nimbleness of wit as well as originality of thought, 
who should brighten discussions which evinced a 
tendency to become dull in their profundity. 
Trench and Kemble, Maurice and BuUer represent 
opposites, amongst the earlier lights ; and by and by 
Arthur Hallam and Spedding relaxed their deeper 
interests and heavier weighted minds — and bandied 
nonsense with Blakesley and Monckton Milnes. 

Two of the Society's most brilliant members did 
not long shed their light upon it. Alfred Tennyson, 
too lethargic to have his essay prepared when his turn 
came and it was demanded of him", was asked to 
resign. The subject of this essay was " Ghosts/' and 
he had partly finished it, but unfortunately only part of 
the proem remains. Monckton Milnes, on the other hand, 
was only elected a member a few terms before he went 
" down." Yet these two did much to bring the Society 
to the high prominence it attained during the early 
years of its existence. 

Merivale gives a quaint picture of their apostolic 
mission : 

" It was with the vague idea that it should be our 
function to interpret the oracles of transcendental 
wisdom to the world of Philistines or Stumpfs, as we 
designated them, and from time to time to call forth 
from this world the few souls who might be found 
capable of sympathizing with them, that we piqued 
ourselves on the name of the ' Apostles,' a name given 



THE "APOSTLES" ii 

us, as we were sometimes told, by the envious and 
jeering vulgar, but to which we presumed that we had 
a legitimate claim, and gladly accepted it. We lived, 
in constant intercourse with one another, day by day, 
meeting over our wine or our tobacco, but every Satur- 
day evening we held a more solemn meeting, when 
each member of the Society, about twelve in number, 
delivered an essay on any subject, chosen by himself, to 
be discussed and submitted to the vote of the whole 
number. Alas ! alas ! what reckless, joyous evenings 
those were, what solemn things were said, pipe in hand ; 
how much serious emotion was mingled with alternate 
bursts of laughter ; how every one hit his neighbour 
intellectually, right and left, and was hit again, and no 
mark left on either side ; how much sentiment and 
how much humour ! Who is the poet who says, and 
how aptly he might have said to us : 

Witty as youthful poets in their wine, 

Bold as a centaur at a feast, and kind 

As virgins that were ne'er beguiled with love. 

The style of our lucubrations may be illustrated per- 
haps by a saying of one of our profound philosophers, 
Jack Kemble : ' The world is one great thought, and 
I am thinking it.' " 

Regular meetings for the expression of definite 
thought had at least the effect of helping an " Apostle " 
to " see himself." The effort to show his best to 
anxious adorers, to speak his soul before his peers, to 
shine as bright as other stars, were acts that gave the 
ablest of them a serene confidence in himself and his 
own genius. It is scarcely surprising that some of 



12 THE CAMBRIDGE '^APOSTLES" 

them, stimulated by such surroundings, nursed on 
such applause, should afterwards have come to look 
the whole world calmly in the face — and even to have 
dared to play with it. 

Monckton Milnes once wrote : '' We have had some 
capital debates in our Society called ' The Apostles,' 
we attacked Paley last night." But that subjects were 
not always so stiff as Paley is proved by Sir James Fitz- 
James Stephen's paper entitled : '' Is a little know- 
ledge a dangerous thing ? " And that the manners 
of the " Apostles " were not always dignified and 
reposeful is proved by the following : " Last Saturday 
we had an * Apostolic ' dinner . . . most of them 
stayed till past two. John Heath volunteered a song : 
Kemble got into a passion about nothing, but quickly 
jumped out again : and Thompson poured large quan- 
tities of salt upon Douglas Heath's head, because he 
talked nonsense." 

*' Apostleship " did not end with college life, and 
members resident or visiting Cambridge could, by 
giving notice to the host of the evening, attend a meet- 
ing of the younger men ; and this they often elected 
to do. The particular *' Apostles " dealt with in this 
volume all took in after life every opportunity for 
meeting their old fellow " Apostles " in the company 
of the new. They never relaxed their affection for the 
Society; to their last days ''its membership constituted 
a bond of friendship which revived in them the fresh- 
ness of youth." Many were the occasions when they 
brought the tale of their newest success and latest 



THE "APOSTLES" 13 

laurels to add interest to the many interests that met 
together at the yearly " Apostolic " dinner ; a festival 
held for years at the Star and Garter, Richmond. 
With old " Apostles " only the most imperative calls 
prevented their assisting, for to have each other's 
society in convivial intercourse was part and parcel of 
the scheme of life laid in early college days. 

" Kemble, Sterling, the two BuUers and all the stars 
of the first magnitude are announced as having pro- 
mised to shine." This was at a meeting at the Free- 
mason's Tavern, another haunt of the " Apostles." 
It was at this feast they had the " inadequate conso- 
lation " of drinking the healths of those forced to be 
absent. It was Sterling who, at another merry meal, 
gave " a melancholy account of the coldness produced 
at Trinity by the late controversy." This when a war 
was waging concerning the question of admitting Dis- 
senters to university degrees, and when fears had been 
expressed in Parliament as to the effect of free 
theological discussion amongst undergraduates — and 
comment had been made upon the meetings and the 
freedom of speech of the '' Apostles." 

But witty Connop Thirlwall, then a tutor, on 
that occasion took up the cudgels for his fellow 
" Apostles " and spoke eloquently in their favour, 
saying : 

" You may be alarmed when I inform you that there 
has long existed in this place a society of young men — 
limited, indeed, in numbers, but continually receiving 



14 THE CAMBRIDGE ^'APOSTLES" 

new members to supply its vacancies, and selecting 
them in preference amongst the youngest, in which all 
subjects of highest interest, without any exclusion of 
those connected with religion are discussed with the 
most perfect freedom. But, if this fact is new to you, 
let me instantly dispel any apprehension it may excite 
by assuring you that the members of this society, for 
the most part, have been and are amongst the choicest 
ornaments of the University, and that some are now 
among the ornaments of the Church, and that so far 
from having had their affections embittered, their 
friendships torn and lacerated, their union has been 
rather one of brothers than of friends." 

For this he was called upon to resign his tutorship, 
but a living was given him, and he went away with the 
applause of the University and the love of the " Apos- 
tles," and afterwards became Bishop of St. David's. 

It was an age of early development and of early per- 
fection, and some of the *' Apostles " — all of them 
workers — accomplished their best work in those Cam- 
bridge days. When The Athenceum fell into the hands 
of Sterling and Maurice it was produced almost en- 
tirely by the " Society," but the material with which 
they then filled its pages, and which reads so well to- 
day — failed in its own time to interest. Trench said 
of the paper : 

" Should it obtain an extensive circulation, it is 
calculated to do much good. It is a paper not merely 
of principle, but what is almost equally important, of 
principles — certain fixed rules to which compositions 
are referred, and by which they are judged. In this it 



THE ^'APOSTLES" 15 

is superior, not merely to contemporary papers, but to 
the Reviews of the highest pretension." 

There were always those who gently scoffed at what 
was deemed the " pretensions " of the " Apostles," and 
the scoffers were sometimes of themselves. Merivale, 
one of the breeziest of their critics, says humorously : 

" Monteith and Garden are indignant and wild at 
being forbidden by their governors, who appear to be 
as identical as they are themselves, to go abroad. I 
leave them each writing a letter in his respective style. 
How inconsistent with themselves are Human facul- 
ties ! The genius that can presage the fulfilment of the 
-Apocalypse overlooks the specks and motes in futurity, 
and is taken by surprise by a paternal admonition." 

These letters, however, had the effect of procuring for 
the two " identicals " the desired tour ; a tour which 
took the usual '' Apostolic " form of a pilgrimage to 
Venice, and a romantic lingering beneath the windows 
of a palace in the hope of seeing some philosophical 
metaphysical maniac such as he of whom the poet 
Shelley wrote in Julian and Maddalo. 

Sometimes " Apostles " were scorned by men of 
genius as great as their own, men who afterwards came 
to the front and stayed there ; and there were even 
those who attacked them, and one of themselves — 
who shall be nameless — who sought to '' betray them," 
and by his conduct caused commotion and emotion. 
" A Judas," he was termed, '* who could not or would 
not understand the principles on which the Society was 
based." 



i6 THE CAMBRIDGE '^APOSTLES" 

But trivial assaults the " Apostles " could afford to 
ignore, for if they had detractors, they had also ad- 
mirers and imitators. W. E. Gladstone founded an 
Essay Club at Oxford on the model of the " Apostles " 
and boasted of it — though he owned it never quite 
satisfied him. '' The Apostles," he said, " are a much 
more general society." Blakesley leaves it recorded 
that it was Arthur Hallam who founded this Club, and 
he probably thought this because Hallam had given 
Gladstone help in the drawing up of its rules. " The 
Sterling " was certainly inspired by the " Apostles," 
as were numerous other societies ; and, indirectly, the 
London Library, an institution of an entirely different 
kind, grew out of it. 

It was, however, close brotherhood, and not society- 
making which the " Apostles " strove to attain, and 
that which they successfully achieved — the affectionate 
bond between them being strengthened, not only by 
the frequency and fervency with which they encour- 
aged each other in their work, but by the perseverance 
with which they advertised that work when done. 
They were in all cases the first and strongest champions 
of each other's claims to public attention, and their 
mutual assistance and admiration were reckoned to 
have been '' stimulating to them in youth and advan- 
tageous to them in manhood." 

Almost without exception their joyous anticipations 
for each other's future were fulfilled, and the friendship 
which commenced in the bud and flourished in the 
flower withered only with death. 



THE ^'APOSTLES" 17 

*' Those Cambridge ' Apostles ' of whom Brookfield 
was one," said Kinglake (but here he was mistaken. 
Brookfield was in the habit of saying, " I was an 
acting Apostle, though never rated as one on the 
ship's books") ^^and with whom he lived a great 
deal, were all of them men highly gifted, and 
Brookfield was still closely associated with several of 
their number when at length, after a few years of 
conflict, they forced their opinions, their tastes and 
their crotchets upon a puzzled and reluctant world. 
Thenceforth it happened, from time to time, that some 
modest ' Apostle ' woke up and found himself famous, 
and great was then Brookfield' s delight ; but he 
always repudiated the notion that any of ' the initiated ' 
should allow the least feeling of surprise to mingle with 
their joy, saying proudly and exultingly : * As if we 
did not know that this would come ! ' " 

With close friendship and tried brotherhood came a 
laudable wish to right all wrong. As an example of 
spontaneous charity and a picture of unbounded en- 
thusiasm, the conduct of the " Apostles " who took 
part in the Spanish business of 1823-30,^ stands unique ; 
for neither personal ambition nor profit were con- 
cerned. The young men were sure that their heroes 
were oppressed, and wrongfully, and that was enough. 
They offered their goods — in some cases their lives — to 
the cause, and lost the former, and were prepared to 
lose the latter, without a murmur. Nothing came of 
this their great romantic effort, but it was a brilliant 
failure — as much to the credit of those young men as 

1 See Chap. XIII. 
{2—2318) 



i8 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

many of their dazzling achievements. It also sheds 
light upon the whole " Apostolate " — it shows they 
had hearts as well as heads, and that *' free discussion " 
in their case had in no way narrowed their wide 
sympathies. 

Monckton Milnes, (Lord Houghton), who was as proUd 
of being an " Apostle " as he was of being an English 
gentleman, at an inaugural address at the opening of 
the new Union at Trinity in '66, spoke enthusiastically 
and admiringly of the friends, contemporaries of his 
own, who had tested their powers in the old debating 
club ; these old friends being, strangely enough, all of 
them with the exception of Kinglake, " Apostles." 
His Lordship said with feeling : 

" Charles Buller, whose young statesmanship you 
will find recorded in Westminster Abbey, but whose 
charm of character and talent belong to the domain of 
personal regard, and John Sterling, whose tumultuous 
spirit and lofty character still live — and will long live 
in the biographies of Hare and Carlyle. My lot was 
cast with a somewhat later generation. ... I believe 
that the members of that generation were for the 
wealth of their promise — a promise in most cases 
perfectly fulfilled — a rare body of men, such as this 
University has seldom contained. . . . 

" There was Tennyson, the Laureate, whose goodly 
bay tree decorates our language and our land. Arthur 
Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, the poet and his 
friend passing linked hand in hand together down the 
slopes of fame. There was Trench, the present Arch- 
bishop of Dublin, and Alford, Dean of Canterbury, 



THE "APOSTLES" 19 

both profound Scriptural philologists, who have not 
disdained the secular muse. 

" There was Spedding, who has, by a philosophical 
affinity, devoted the whole of his valuable life to the 
rehabilitation of the character of Lord Bacon — and 
there was Merivale, who, I hope, by some attraction 
of repulsion, has devoted so much learning to the 
vindication of the Caesars. There were Kemble and 
Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and 
our latest war — Kemble, as interesting an individual 
as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his 
own race ; Kinglake, as bold a man at arms in litera- 
ture as ever confronted public opinion. There was 
Venables, whose admirable writings, unfortunately 
-anonymous, we are reading every day without knowing 
to whom to attribute them ; and there was Blakesley, 
Honorary Canon of Canterbury, the ' Hertfordshire 
Incumbent ' of the Times. There were sons of families 
which seemed to have a hereditary right to, a sort of 
habit of, academic distinction, like the Heaths and the 
Lushingtons. But I must check this throng of advanc- 
ing memories, and I will pass from this point with the 
mention of two names which you will not let me omit 
— one of them, that of your Professor of Greek, whom 
it is to the honour of Her Majesty's late Government 
to have made Master of Trinity — Thompson ; and the 
other, that of your latest Professor, F.jD. Maurice, 
in whom you will all soon recognize the true enthusiasm 
of humanity." 



CHAPTER II 

WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 

Brooks, for they called you so that knew you best, 
Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes, 
How oft we two have heard St. Mary's chimes ! 
How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest. 
Would echo helpless laughter to your jest ! 

(Tennyson) 

An essentially original man, William Henry Brookfield, 
*^the friend of the Apostles," did nothing common- 
place. When he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, 
in the autumn of 1829, it was as a sizar in the 
days \^^hen the sizar was as Bulwer Lytton describes 
him in the play of Money. Having sacrificed his 
^' articles," which had cost his parents some hun- 
dreds of pounds, and having turned his back upon 
the profession chosen for him, he, in extenuation, 
thought thus to save their purse ; and they. Spartan 
parents of the period, who expected implicit obedience, 
sternly allowed him for a term to remain in that 
position ; afterwards they placed him in the College 
on a proper footing. 
He was just twenty when he went up, and though 

he began his Cambridge career later than most of 

20 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 21 

the wonderful men whose happy companion he so 
soon became, he was about the same age as they, 
he and Tennyson having been born in the same month 
of the same year and almost on the same day — the 
others only differing by a month or so. 

Shortly after his arrival he was introduced by a 
friend of his family to Monckton Milnes and Robert 
Monteith, and these discovering immediately his pecu- 
liar merits, handed him on to their friends, who accepted 
him with an enthusiasm as warm as their own. True, 
it was the age of enthusiasm, but few were greeted 
in so flattering a fashion. Men of the highest ability 
and most striking intellect in the University sought 
him out and at once became his intimates ; it soon 
was considered a privilege to be seen walking and 
talking with him ; and the young man never ceased 
to remember with gratitude his hearty reception into 
the best society that Cambridge contained. His 
charming manners and handsome appearance never 
failed to make an excellent first impression, which 
was always subsequently strengthened by his wit, 
good sense, and higher qualities. 

Although he cut, perhaps, no deep flutes on the 
pillars of time, he inspired, cheered and stimulated 
more ambitious friends, who afterwards achieved 
both name and fame ; friends happy to know they 
had him to go to in joy and in sorrow ; happy that he 
was to be found awaiting them — with unclouded 
brillancy and unaltered affection. 

His capacity for friendships of " the intellectual 



22 THE CAMBRIDGE '^ APOSTLES " 

sort " was immense ; and with Arthur Hallam — 
whose close companion he was during that youth's last 
year of college life, and Alfred Tennyson, whose 
northern nature consorted so genially with his own 
— he almost lived. In fact, those who were first 
attracted by his indescribable humour and poetical 
sensibility, were those whose own brilliancy had 
secured them the intellectual distinction to which 
allusion has been made in the preceding chapter — they 
were the " Apostles." From the earliest days Brook- 
field and the '' Society " coalesced amiably and admir- 
ably. Others not " Apostles," though equally dis- 
tinguished, also showered attention upon him, amongst 
these Thackeray and Kinglake, whose friendships 
with him continued throughout their lives close and 
cordial. 

Said one of them : " To a wonderful extent he 
knew the hearts and souls and minds of his associates 
and could tell beforehand what each of them under 
given conditions would be likely to do and to say." 

Brookfield, besides his ingenious wit, had the per- 
ception of beauty as well as the poetic instinct which 
ran through all that group, and which seems to have 
been a particular possession of the time ; he had also 
an inborn spontaneous humour which was rare even 
in a period when the sense of it was more than usually 
acute, and when there were never so many exponents. 

In his rooms the fines fleurs met and talked, argued 
and criticised with the enthusiasm of their youth, 
and an extra enthusiasm brought about by the intel- 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 23 

lectual movement of the moment ; there they assem- 
bled and sought in their favourite poet for profound 
philosophies he did not always possess ; and in their 
philosopher for poetry they did not always find. 
While Brookfield with his " purhng nonsense " would 
cap and crown in his own way their scholarly decisions, 
criticising too, but, in his turn, seeking for individual 
quaintnesses — where the staider minds sought deep 
and occult meaning. By day and by night they 
were always together, on the freest and most un- 
ceremonious of terms — forming their futures in 
those golden hours. It was the time of inspiration, 
the influence of which was never lost — and which, 
when the time came for disbanding they sighed in 
speech and verse to have to leave behind them. 
Brookfield was the confidant and intimate of all the 
set. To him they went, to him most things were 
referred ; his personal influence was great over every 
one of them, and so great that Arthur Hallam once 
told him " he felt when seeing him daily and hourly, 
he could not pursue steadily the resolutions he had 
formed about work." On the other hand, to this 
genial, if somewhat distracting influence, the Hallams 
attributed Arthur's increased cheerfulness during his 
last year at Cambridge. 

Brookfield occasionally helped Hallam in his busi- 
ness affairs, and even interviewed his ''duns" for him; he 
read all his work as he did it, listened to all the emo- 
tions he went through, and late at night would sit down 
to copy out for himself in order to hand on to others 



24 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

whatever of poetry had issued forth from any of " his 
young poets " during the day. 

The closeness of Brookfield's intimacy with Tenny- 
son and Arthur Hallam led to visits at each other's 
homes during holidays^ and letters to each other when 
apart. 

Arthur Hallam once wrote to him — 

"My dear Brookfield, — 

" The very wretched state of mind, and frequent 
touches of illness I have had since I saw you, must be 
my excuse, if you need one, that I have not written 
to you. And now I am in no writing mood : as soon 
as I am you shall hear from me. What is the use then, 
you will very naturally ask, of making you pay postage 
for this scrap ? It is as follows. I have received 

this morning a dunning letter from , for nine 

pounds odd, which I have owed him the greater part of 
the past eternity. I suppose I forgot to mention his 
name to you among the others. At any rate, I forgot 
whether you told me anything about him. I don't 
feel as if I have had a receipt from the snob, so I fear 
it must be a true bill. In case, however, you should 
have already paid it, I would fain know. In the pro- 
bable event that you can give no such favourable 
answer, I wish you would put on your very blandest 

look and declare to Mr. on my part, that my 

sorrow to hear of his maltreatment by me is only 
equalled by my surprise ; and that I fully thought 
he had been paid in a general commission to pay 
entrusted to a friend (you needn't say it was yourself 
unless you chuse) ; that I should be much obliged to 
him to wait rather more than a month longer, at 
which time I shall certainly be passing through Cam- 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 25 

bridge, and will have great pleasure in paying him. 
Should this not serve, put on another bland look, 
and entreat Garden and Monteith to take between 
them this debt on their hands, and they shall be paid, 
without fail, this summer. Write to me speedily 
and tell me how you are, and whether there is any 
chance of seeing you. 

'' Ever your affectionate friend, 

^^A. H. Hallam." 

Tennyson, in thanking Brookfield for his kindness 
to a member of the Tennyson family, who was 
under medical treatment away from home, said he was 
/' grateful too, for the most definite account I have 
received, and given too, in such a tone of sympathy 
as to render it doubly valuable. You have my thanks 
not only from the lips but from the heart." In the 
same letter the poet complained ** my pen is stabled, 
and my ink is as thick as gruel." 

In an early letter to Tennyson, written soon after 
the book of Poems by Two Brothers was sent the round, 
Brookfield shows the terms he was on with the poet, 
and shows too that he knew what " Alfred " most 
wished to hear — 

" You and Rob Montgomery are our only brewers 
now ! A propos to the latter. Jingling James, his 
namesake, dined with us last week. And now for a 
smack of Boswell. 

" Brookfield : Glass of wine after your fish ? Mont- 
gomery : I thank you, sir ! B. : Which vegetable, 
sir ? M. : A potato, if you please. B. : Another, 



26 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

sir ? M. : That will do, I thank you. B. : Talking 
of potatoes, sir, have you read Alfred Tennyson ? 
M. : Only in the reviews yet, but there are two 
brothers, aren't there ? B. : Both ' rather pretty,' 
but Alfred alone has been extracted at any length 
in the reviews. M. : He has very wealthy and 
luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, 
and is a poet. But there is plenty of room for im- 
provement, and I would have it so. Your trim cor- 
rect young writers seldom turn out well. A young 
poet should have a great deal which he can afford to 
throw away as he gets older. Tennyson can afford 
this. 

" I sent him copies of both you and Charles yester- 
day, and met him in the street this morning. He 
said he was going out of town, but we would talk 
about you when he came back and read you. * I 
read,' said he, ' twelve of the sonnets last night, which 
if I had not liked them better than other sonnets I 
could not have done. There are great outbreaks of 
poetry in them.' Omitting my own inter] ectional 
queries, etc., which leave to Jemmy's remarks an over- 
pompous connectedness which they had not viva voce, 
I give you his words as nearly as I remember. They 
are not important, but we generally wish to know 
what is said of us, whether trivial or not. At autopsy- 
chography I am not good, if I had any idiopsychology 
to autopsychographize. I am just about as happy 
as a fish, neither excited by mirth, nor depressed by 
sadness. The Clerk's letter awoke me rather this 
morning ; if he be yet with you tell him it had been 
good service to have done so two months earlier. 
Writing from Somersby where there is so much to 
prevent one from thinking of any place else was cer- 
tainly a meritorious exertion, and it has brought my 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 27 

pardon. My love to the wretch, and let him know 
he shall expiate his neglect by silence on my part, 
until I know whether his address be your house. 
Which information do thou give me in a day or two ; 
and tell me all about Frederick, and Charles. From 
the former I could never worm a letter yet, but unless 
you can coax so much of him without, I shall perhaps 
make one more effort shortly. My kindest regards 
to all your family. 

" Ever, dearest Alfred, yours, 

"W. H. Brookfield. 
" P.S. — I wish very much you would make a sonnet 
for me as Hallam once did. I could not value it more, 
and should not less, than his. It may be that I could 
hot make a more boring request. But I will incur 
nine chances of vexing you and thereby myself for 
the sake of the tenth of getting what I want." 

Later on Tennyson says to him — 

" Hollo ! Brooks, Brooks ! for shame ! What 
are you about musing and brooding yourself out of 
this life into the next ? Shake yourself, you owl o' 
the turret, you ; come forth you cat-a-mountain ; 
you shall chew no more cud. I swear by Spedding's 
speech, and Hallam's essay, by the right hand of 
Tennant, and the eyes of Thompson, by the impetuous 
pomp of the taller^ — and the voluptuous quiverings 
of the eyeglass of the smaller — Scotchman, I swear 
by the mildness of Heath and the memory of Trench 
that thou shalt chew no more cud ! 

I have been and still continue to be very unwell. 
Brooks, and my eyes grow daily worse, otherwise you 
should hear oftener from me, but you must not be 
suUen and fall out with me, and abuse me in public 



28 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

and private, because I am sometimes selfish enough 
to prefer a state of purbhndness to one of utter 
amaurosis which would speedily succeed any continuous 
exertion of that sight which I am only anxious to pre- 
serve in order that I may look upon you once again — 
there now, the sentiment is pretty, tho' it be clumsily 
worded. I have told you the truth and I will have 
no more growling. 

" The Spring is burgeoning fast about us, and the 
crocus pierces thro' the dark moist moulds like a 
tongue of flame. You came to see us when there was 
an utter dearth of all beauty in holt and hill — perhaps 
we may see you sometime in the summer when the 
shining landskip is 

''crisp with woods 
And tufted knolls on wavy wolds, 

" Thine, dear Brooks, to the end of time, 

''A. T. 
" Remembrances which range thro' every shade of 
affectionate feeling according to the original constitu- 
tion, and superinduced habits of the individuals, from 
every member of the family." 

Brookfield did go again, in summer weather, to 
Somersby, and at a time when Hallam was there too — 
and it was then that he said, as Tennyson who was 
justifiably proud of his muscles was performing some 
feat of strength, ''It is not fair, Alfred, that you 
should be Hercules as well as Apollo." 

When these Cambridge companions at last set forth 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 29 

on their several roads in life, Brookfield noted that 
his most frequent and fervent correspondents were 
" Apostles/' and of them he says, " No man ever had 
such friends as I." Not only did he remain in touch 
with those of his own day, but he allured to him the 
eminent ones who followed ; Lyttelton, Harcourt, 
Stephen Springvice, Harry Hallam, etc., in turn 
became his friends. 

^;, In 1836, Brookfield, then a curate at Southampton, 
returned to Cambridge in order to take his M.A. 
degree. For one reason or another many of the com- 
panions of earlier times had also gathered there ; some 
of them engaged upon the same business as himself, 
some, glad to be there upon any pretext, while others 
were there in residence — '' reverend, reserved, sober 
dons." Brookfield no sooner returned to the scene 
of his duties than Francis Garden wrote — 

" A clack speek has been gathering in the Cambridge 
horizon till it has become a large cloud threatening 
soon to discharge itself upon my devoted head unless 
you can help me to a conductor — in other words. 
Heath is clamorous for the Tennysonian MSS. I left 
in your possession at M.A. time. For any sake send 
them to him or to me if you have got them, if you 
have not tell me what you did with them. Tennyson 
is ready to swear they were not left in his room. 
The Heath in question is not the realization 
of the idealization, but the brother of the same, the 
Rev. J. L. Heath, Trinity College, Cambridge. Are 
you often at Botley Hill ? I hold myself absolved 
from the duty of writing you a long letter because I 



30 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

have reasonable prospects of seeing you soon, namely, 
if Trench can receive me. Pray write soon to me anent 
the book or else send it direct to Heath and we can 
talk over its contents when we meet, which we cannot 
ver}/ well do before. I propose commencing my 
pleasuring in about a week or ten days, or if Trench 
pleases will begin with him. He may be on the look- 
out for a letter written from me that time, if he cares 
to have one. Tell him." 

Trouble was a word unknown to this set of friends, 
a detour of sixty or one hundred miles was to them a 
pleasant pastime ; no journey was too long or too 
fatiguing which brought any of them together ; to be 
forced to travel outside a coach in winter, inside in 
summer, but made meeting merrier and gave oppor- 
tunity for the indulgence of the graphic detail in which 
they all delighted and indulged. It was in those days 
that they strove to be postman one to the other. 
Tennyson or Trench would arrive at Brookfield's 
lodgings in Southampton (a pied a terre through which 
most of the '* Apostles " at one time or the other passed) 
or at his home near Sheffield, bearing on him a letter 
from Blakesley or Kemble or others " a month old," 
but " preferring that delivery," and would themselves 
carry away his reply when they went, in order to give 
it up with *' own hands." 

What caused and what kept up the attraction 
between this especial and wonderful few ? It did not 
come only from the recognition of and beUef in each 
other's talents — for their gifts were so sure and obvious 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 31 

that they were lightly esteemed ; it was, most 
likely, because together with the mental brilUance and 
physical charm which they all of them possessed 
they had in due proportion some essence peculiarly 
human and affectionate. Then again there was, in 
those days, a class camaraderie which it is difficult to 
describe or even to realize in these times when class 
distinctions have ceased to exist. However, it is 
obvious that a similarity of experience and an identity 
of aim brought about a mutual understanding and 
sympathy in the gentle circles of the early Victorian era 
which could not exist nowadays when " Society " 
is a junction at which all have arrived by different 
routes and with different destinations. 

When he went to Cambridge in 1840 to assist in 
Lord Lyttelton's candidature for the High Steward- 
ship, Brookfield fell again upon a full apostolic band. 
Of this period Dean Merivale says : — 

" Well — this evening a small barrel of concentrated 
essence of gunpowder will be introduced under the 
Vice-Chancellor's chair ; at the fatal moment Blakes- 
ley, Brogden, and Kemble will form a train, Brook- 
field will set fire to Christie and apply him to the latter, 
and up we shall go majority and minority — to a place 
where Trinity is better appreciated. . . . 

" We consoled ourselves on Thursday night with a 
joyous supper at my rooms embracing Trench and 
Brookfield, Alfred, Milnes, H. Lushington ^x' " ^^^^ 
and the Cambridge residents. Kemble, who possesses 
the rare merit of being equally good, absent or pre- 
sent, furnished forth a large portion of the repast. 



32 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

Brookiield's experiences of Calvinists^ and Trench's 
self -rebuked amusement were equally edifying." 

Brookfield had, that night, rolled off, knowing it 
would amuse his companions, a description of his 
former rector at Southampton and some of his flock, 
impersonating each of them with such truth and spirit 
that even Trench, who maintained that mimicry was 
a weapon to be feared, and not a toy to be played with, 
was forced into merriment. 

A shining light at Cambridge, a beacon at South- 
ampton, Brookfield's fame as a preacher preceded him 
to London, where popularity and success were his 
immediate reward ; where his fellow curates told him 
of the sensation he caused ; where friends, old and 
new, vied in proclaiming his eloquence. Even that 
element of fame, the anonymous letter, was not denied 
him ; and a well-known curiosity of the forties, who 
called himself '' Shemaiah the Jew," addressed him as 
" Wise and eloquent in your instructions the Prophet 
marvelled at thee. Minister of Promise, Fear not ! " 

Lord Lyttelton told him '' he had never heard any 
one so easy, almost colloquial, insomuch that there 
was a sort of temptation to forget that it was preaching 
and get up and answer him. He also told me that I 
might consider my fame as spread over the four 
quarters — for Lady Jersey was there, the most worldly 
woman, and greatest religious gossip in London, and 
she could hardly keep her seat for agitation. . . . 
Nevertheless, it was a very ineloquent sermon, very 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 33 

hard, and chiefly doctrinah Strange how worldly 
people do like such things." In those days he would 
often say, " Preached on so and so — but it was very 
Pill," but Greville in his diaries records : "A mag- 
nificent sermon from Brookfield. He is one of the 
few preachers whose sermons never weary me, how- 
ever long . . . and the elocution perfect." 

Buller and Milnes and other friends resident in 
London, with pleasant memories of his Cambridge 
sparkle and humour, now collected about him, took 
him out, introduced him, and, in their still youthful 
ardour, endeavoured with him to reconstruct old 
times. 

" Breakfasted with Lyttelton," he notes ; " thence 
to Milnes, where were many of us — I stopped till one. 
Oxford and Cambridge Club with Chapman, Milnes 
and Spedding. The latter and I dined at an eating 
house near St. James', thence to Spedding's rooms to 
smoke. The two Heaths came in, and some Tenny- 
sons. All night diverting toothache with Carlyle's 
French Revolution'' 

With no delay he became a favoured guest at all 
the great " Breakfasts " of which the literary ones 
were Rogers', Hallam's, and Milnes'. 

Of his second visit to Rogers he wrote in his diary — 

" To Rogers with Milnes to breakfast. Rogers said, 
* The Queen said, when somebody condoled that she 
should have such a lot of business, '' If I were not 
Queen, I should like to be minister." ' She is a very 
clever girl (though I never heard but that one mot)^ 

3— (2318) 



34 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

and at starting was far ahead of other girls ; but thus 
she will stand and will afterwards be surpassed. Of 
Melbourne, Rogers said that he was an upright, 
honourable, well-meaning man, but could not teach 
the Queen the savoir faire, for he had it not himself — 
would sit down on the wrong chair, turn his back when 
he ought not to do so, and so on; that the Queen 
was a great theologian, could pose a bishop, and 
had the Fathers in her bedroom. Of George IV. he 
said he was a dreadfully coarse-tongued man ; and 
somebody (W.H.B.) said he had heard he could not 
* sustain the character of a gentleman so long as 
Macready.' 

" Milnes spoke of one with an exaggerated reputation 
of wit — ^it was said he was very modest. * What has 
he to be modest of ? ' was said in reply. 

Of his first meeting with Carlyle he wrote in his 
letters to his family and with all the enthusiasm of 
his nature, but in his diary he only records — 

" Called on Milnes. Carlyle came in. We all then 
called on Rogers. Carlyle' s ' English with the meat 
blown out of it,' was good applied to Puseyism, and 
tremendously good was his account of having been on 
a jury lately. I liked his * The Queen is like a canary 
bird looking out on a tempest.' Afterwards to 
Spedding's, where were Thompson and others." 

Occasionally he and his friends would live over again 
with renewed fervour their " golden Cambridge days 
and nights " — 

'' I hied me to Lushington's, where were Edmund 
Lushington, Frank Lushington, Henry Lushington, 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 35 

Tennyson, Milnes, Monteith, Spedding, Venables. I 
breakfasted next morn with Rogers, Smith, Milnes, 
Thirlwall, Spedding and Gladstone." A brilHant 
company indeed to be collected at one table ! It 
was at this meal that Sydney Smith said of the 

Bishop of , '' He is so hke Judas Iscariot that I 

now firmly beheve in the Apostolical Succession." 

He used to dine in the city with a great giver of 
dinners and a very pleasant person, a Mr. Pawles. 

" I dined, as you ingeniously surmised last night, at 
Mr. Pawles'. There was present Warren, the author 
o.f Diary of a late Physician. I never was more bored 
than by his eternal volubility, unsignalized by one 
syllable of wit, mere volubility — chiefly about him- 
self, perpetual allusions to his literary habits — good- 
natured withal, but so terribly conscious of being a 
bit of a lion, and at the same time in all his eternal 
talk not saying a thing that could justify his claim to 
being called one. May I never again meet a small 
self-conscious literary lion." 

If Brookfield at that time called on one '* Apostle " 
he would be sure to find another present, while others 
would always '' happen " to join them ; then to- 
gether, in a troop, they would go to his rooms to " tea 
and anchovies," Cambridge fashion. Marriage made 
Httle difference in these customs ; when " Apostles " 
were in London or when they passed through, they 
would assemble at his house, and " vastly pleasant " 
were the meetings. Thackeray would come in " after 
everybody else had gone," and stay far into the 



36 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

night. Milnes, Tennyson, Venables, Garden, Meri- 
vale and Spedding would collect each other and 
descend upon him. '' To-night they rose and made a 
row when I entered, which vexed the soul of Garden. 
Exceedingly pleasant." 

Brookfield was, early in his career, elected a member 
of the Sterhng Club, which being composed principally 
of Cambridge " Apostles " made another pleasant ren- 
dezvous for himself and friends. After a " Sterhng " 
one night, he " proposed to Thackeray and Kinglake to 
invade Spedding's," and after some time spent there, 
went '* thence to Venables," with whom I sate tete-d- 
tete the rest of the night discussing many things. To- 
day called on the Bullers, walked with Charles BuUer. 
called on Ludlows." 

People then made parties in order that the men of this 
particular group might meet together — certain that 
if they collected only two or three of them their assem- 
bly must be interesting, gay and cheerful. Monckton 
Milnes would get, whenever he could, Brookfield and 
Thirlwall for his greatest occasions ; for no one better 
than he appreciated the value of those most brilliant 
talkers. 

First in the ranks of conversationalists, people who 
met Brookfield never forgot him, yet they confessed 
they could never adequately describe the genius 
" which got humorous delight out of every incident, 
even the commonest." He had a cultivated and melan- 
choly voice, and often when the whole room was laugh- 
ing at his saUies, his would be the only grave face in it. 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 37 

From his letter writing it is not easy to see why 
he gave up his earhest love, " a literary life ;" his mat- 
ter is generally good, his descriptions vivid, his style 
strong and original ; but clerical duties over, his time 
was invariably occupied with society. Of a sociable 
nature, he would leave whatever he was employed 
upon with little reluctance if his interrupters were to 
his liking, and he said to his bride during one of their 
short separations : ** I have been broken in upon by 
Milnes and Tennyson and Monteith (my Emma's, 
Ada's and Cecilia's) who have staid two hours and now 
take me out with them." People said sometimes it 
was of no use " asking Brookfield into the dull 
country, for there he would sigh for genius, wits, 
souls, and all that sort of thing," and once his 
wife wrote : " L. would send her love, if you 
would accept it from one who is not clever ; she 
alludes to the new accusation that you only patronize 
clever people." It was not that he sought out the 
great and famous but that they sought out him and 
encouraged him to be thoroughly at home and on 
easy terms with them. And he in turn appreciated 
the high honour and favour which his talents 
attracted. 

Brookfield went once with Venables, Tennyson, and 
Lushington to some public meeting '' governmental, 
and gratuitous." There was a great crowd, and as 
only a limited number could be let in at one time, the 
iron grating was shut in their faces. Brookfield on 
this whispered through the railings to the official in 



38 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

charge : " You had better let us in; we are friends of 
the celebrated Mr. Brookfield/' upon which came, 
" Oh, I beg your pardon, sir," and at once, to the 
amusement of his companions, the gate opened, and 
they were admitted. About this story he would say 
when telling it, '' The only joke was that nobody at 
the time was more entirely unknown than I." They 
had the pretty habit of returning each other's 
visits on the same day, or at latest, the following — a 
fact which displays their sure and rock-like friendship 
as clearly as it reveals their own belief in their own 
powers to please. 

People continued to praise his preaching, as indeed 
they did his whole life through, and we hear : '" This 
morning Andrewes (clerk in orders. Chaplain to House 
of Commons, son of the late Rector, who was also 
Dean of Canterbury) told me also that he had heard 
a great deal of the ' sensation ' I made yesterday 
morning at York Street, that I had got great * Kudos ' 
(Greek for praise), and a person had observed to him 
that ' you may depend upon it he is a very superior 
young man, and does not seem chuck (Andrewes' 
word for conceited) of it either,' to which the latter 
assented. It is not the first time I have received a 
compliment — but the first time that it has been enhanced 
by the addition of unchuckiness. I fear that after the 
last page and half you will not be able to assent to the 
remark of Andrewes' friend. Did I tell you that 
Milnes told me that somebody (who had heard me at 
York Street) had remarked to him that he should like 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 39 

very much to see me in Hamlet — not knowing that I 
was rather Shakesperianly addicted. I am sorry I 
have no amusing anecdote for you, or letters — Alfred's 
is very amusing. I will take care of it. The only 
recordable thing said after Mrs. O.'s departure was 
* Well, I have run away with many a plainer woman 
than that.' I need not tell you who said it." 

So much work was being produced by apostolic 
friends that there was the constant excitement of 
passing it around for approbation and criticism ; and 
Brookfield would unflinchingly give his opinion of 
the structure of Spedding's " Bacon," and the music of 
." Alfred's " verse. As one of them said to the other : 
" We all send out samples of our minds as grocers do 
sugars." But there was nothing narrow about them; 
whatever their own sentiments and convictions they 
could all bear to hear their efforts discussed and could 
listen with patience to the opinions of others. When 
they did not meet they wrote : ''A letter from 
Venables, very droll." " A delightful letter from 
dear old Spedding," and, as above, " Alfred's is very 
amusing." 

Brookfield could not get on with unhumorous 
people ; knowing his own gift he made a study of the 
subject. Once he embarked on an endeavour to get 
material together for a book which should illustrate 
the difference between wit and humour, a subject which 
however he found so varying and so vast that he wisely 
gave it up. With his usual frankness he records— 

" I had lots of funny things to say and that I kept 



40 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

laughing at (why a man should not laugh at his own 
jokes I cannot tell), but they are all gone out of my 
head. ' I am sorry for you/ as the Preacher said 
who had forgotten his sermon — ' You have lost an 
excellent discourse '"; and again — " The mots were not 
worth recording, though explosively laughable. It is 
difificult to record things that depend chiefly on their 
absurdity for their humour, and it is perhaps not an 
unfair test of wit whether it will bear writing or not." 
" In irresistible humour none of the ' Apostles ' rivalled 
Brookfield," said Venables. '' He had infinite humour 
— but humour resulting — like Shakespeare's — from 
mastering of human characters, and not from any 
love of mere shallow, mindless drollery," said Kinglake. 
..." 1 never heard him say a bitter thing." No one 
knew better than he the value of this virtue in smooth- 
ing over the carks of e very-day existence. Once when 
he had forgotten to be in the vestry at St. James', 
Piccadilly, at a time appointed, he says, " I covered 
my shame with the fig-leaf of a humorous note and 
am now once more a punctual man." 

Of Lord — — , Brookfield said : " He is so addicted 
to magnification of anything he is connected with that 
he could not tell you he had eaten a ' Captain's ' 
biscuit, but it would become an ' Admiral's.' " 

A pleasant feature connected with the wit of that 
period is that the most of it was amiable ; most of the 
popular wits being accompHshed enough and good- 
hearted enough to be able to link bright words with 
kind sentiments. There may have been some striv- 



WILLIAM HENRY BROOKFIELD 41 

ing after effect — but they could be grave as well as 
gay. Mr. Brookfield could, between two brilliant 
stories, tell a pathetic one ; once he gave a touching 
description of a poor widow woman, with five children, 
and failing sight which prevented her from performing 
her daily task. " What work ! " he said, " making 
two pairs of soldiers' trousers every day. Twelve 
hours' work for fivepence ! " This outburst at a grand 
party was very telling ; but it had nothing like the effect 
which his "I believe in God, gentlemen," had upon 
a party of Freethinkers who in the midst of a fire- 
work of jokes, began to give the reasons for their 
non-belief. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FRIEND OF THE '' APOSTLES " 

How oft with him we paced that walk of limes, 
Him the lost light of those dawn golden times 
Who loved you well ! 

" You man of humorous-melancholy mark." 

(Tennyson.) 

Brookfield's letters — and he was a great letter 
writer — abound in observant humour^ in pictures of 
people, and most particularly in pictures of himself. 
It was not that he went through any very ex- 
traordinary adventures, nor that he invented thrill- 
ing or amusing incidents which had not really 
occurred (except when he did so avowedly). But 
there seemed to dwell in his brain a myriad of 
ingenious and active gnomes who could, in a few 
seconds, so fashion and display whatever his eyes and 
ears brought to them, that what, related by another, 
would have been a dull and commonplace occurrence 
became, when told by him, a dramatic incident or 
a side-splitting situation. 

His letters to his friends are good specimens of a 
good style ; and that he had the best gift of the best 
correspondents, namely, the instinct to tell that which 
the receiver most wishes to know, is evident. 



THE FRIEND OF THE ''APOSTLES" 43 

To his betrothed he in early days wrote — 

" I called this morning at 67, Wimpole Street. Had 
a very pleasant half-hour with Mr. and Mrs. and Miss 
Hallam. They seem most likely to go and see you at 
Southampton. Thence to call on Lyttelton, whose 
engagement was yesterday announced — Miss Glyn, 
Sir Stephen's daughter, is the lady ; Mr. Gladstone 
is to marry another sister. Lyttelton was out, doubt- 
less at Miss Glyn's feet. Next I went to Monteith's, 
delighted to find him in, but packing to go off to 
Glasgow to-night. He has been, I believe, a sort of 
semi-lion this season and very much liked. I am 
writing in his company now, and have abandoned 
dinners elsewhere in order to have a secluded repast 
with him at Dick's in Chancery Lane. I could quote 
lots of stuff adjunct to dear Hallam if I had time, 
but I have not. I shall go to Dick's in my Beaver 
hat and Irish linen shirt — poplin vest, merino trousers 
(which are cooler than other trousers), spun silk socks 
and Abyssinian boots. Write me at once a line of 
your scrambling nonsense." 

A little later he says — 

" At 10 I proceeded to Spedding's. You need not 
be rampageous about it, for I took neither smoke nor 
likker (except a cup of tea), and at 11 walked home 
with Lord L. Yesterday I dined at Pawles' {shorts, 
which displayed my shapely extremities and which 
passed off as quietly as so remarkable an outrage 
could; they were not produced at Mrs. Romilly's 
nor will be at Lady L.'s to-night, but were excusable 
in the city, as I am there a west-end type and may 
typify as I like). I sate at dinner between a sillyish 
evangelical Manness and an infinitely silly puseyite 



44 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Mannikinetto. My goodness, gracious, mercy, stars, 
wigs ! I talked in a low whisper to the evan : and 
cold orthodoxy to the puz : — the latter boundlessly the 
most intolerable. I rather ingratiated myself with 
Mrs. P. There was not a single pretty person there, 
nor at the E. Romillys, and at W. Gladstone's, where 
beauty was by no means lacking, I could not help think- 
ing of old Pepys writing down in cypher he thought the 
world would never penetrate : ' Altho' her Grace and 
my Lady Castlemaine were there, I think in my con- 
science that my wife was fairer than any in the pre- 
sence.* Certainly Bruce is prettier than any in the 
world, and Leth than Bruce, and my wife than Leth — 
as Jonathan says, ' The British bang the world, and 
America the British.' This morning I have break- 
fasted heartily with Venables and Lushington. They 
had been at Madame Bunsen's last night, and Ven- 
ables in his serious way was speculating whether when 
the Duchess of Sutherland got home from the same 
party she too was employed like them in getting up a 
faggot and blowing up a fire and making a little tea 
for her solace at three in the morning. The men at 
Spedding's all made (as they generally do) assiduous 
inquiries after you. I see no reason when you get 
back against your joining Spedding and the rest of us 
on our Cloudy Ida'' 

Travelling on the Continent in July, '44 — people in 
those days seem to have generally chosen the heat of 
the summer for visiting the Riviera — he sent from 
Cannes a description of Lord Brougham's villa there — 

" It is a very small box, it is nothing more inside or 
out than what any person of £1,000 a year might have 
in England, but you must add to the supposed villa in 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 45 

England rows of orange trees, olives, looking like jolly 
willows that never weep, indeed exactly like them to 
a superficial eye, both in form and in leaf — the leaf 
white behind in the same way. Oleanders, vines, 
mulberries and the blue Mediterranean stretched 
out within three minutes' walk. I think this 
Cannes country house, tho' void of all magnificence, 
in size and quality not unworthy of a peer tired 
to death of kicking up rows in the House of Lords. 
In the house it was not a little affecting to find on 
the landing place of the stairs a small foot-square 
tablet recording the birth and death of * Louisa Eleanor 
Brougham.' Some indifferent verses follow, and there 
are two other tablets over the two principal bedroom 
doors respectively with lines by Mr. Wellesley and 
Lord Carlisle on the same subject. I conjecture the 
young lady was brought here for her health and per- 
haps the house built for her ; but she died in '39. The 
house is called after her ' Louise-Eleanore,' and it is 
affecting to think of the restless, perturbed and perturb- 
ing ex-chancellor — too ambitious and toof ond of praise 
not to feel many mortifications — coming down here 
alone in yellow fading autumn to stay a few weeks at 
what one may call his daughter's monument — the 
yellow vine-leaves falling about him, the boundless sea 
unfolded like eternity before him — the petty clamour 
he has made, distant and rather silent here. One 
cannot tell what regrets, what common sympathies 
with other men, what humbling contemplation, what 
self-upbraidings, what better hopes and aspirations 
may be suggested in the sweet seclusion of ' Louise- 
Eleanore.' " 

One day he told his wife : 

" G has just called. Hopes we will go and stay 



46 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

with him in six weeks' time. House full meanwhile. 
He reminds me of a country gentleman who had a 
strong fancy for pig-killing, and never allowed one to 
be slain within ten miles without partaking either as 
actor or spectator in the scene. Also of a duke who 
had a passion for funerals and vaults, and knew when 
and where everybody was buried, and at dinner would 
come out with ' I saw your ladyship's great-grand- 
father's cofhn this morning — the velvet in excellent 
preservation — and really very little decay ! ' Our 
friend differs from these only in that visitations seem 
to be his mania. Well, you will be anxious to know 
that I arrived safe at Hungerford market. I pro- 
ceeded to call on a widower (who had sent a deep black- 
edged note requesting consolation), but nothing 
afforded him such consolation as he received from him- 
self detailing every circumstance of his wife's death. 
She was a florid woman with rather profuse black 
ringlets half way down Mrs. Pring's aisle. She ate 
' very 'arty of rabbits smothered in onions, and drank 
very 'arty too ' ; at supper they had cucumber which 
she sliced, eating every alternate slice, ' partaking of 
them afterwards at supper besides ' . . . and she died 
as one might expect ! It is impossible to convey the 
slightest impression of the ecstasy with which the 
widowed narrator diverged into a parenthetic glow of 
animated graphic to describe the quality of the cu- 
cumbers, which were fresh gathered — ' warm with the 
sun upon the rind and within cold as the central caves 
of the earth.' " 

When Mrs. Brookfield was travelHng with the 
Hallams in Austria and bewaihng that her husband 
could not be of the party, he wrote, from Southbourne, 
Sheffield — 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 47 

" South Borneo, 

** schewild. 

"Is it not 400 times better that you should have 
had this journey than that neither should ? The only 
drawback is that into my cup of hatred for you the 
worm envy has now insinuated itself and will evermore 
be lifting its dull crest over the brink ; and for the rest 
of my days, while I scowl in helpless and untravelled 
rage, you will laugh upon me with cheeks that have 
blushed beneath the admiration of an Austrian Count 
and with ' eyes that have looked upon the Adriatic' 

" And yet I scorn to be outdone. On Monday, the 
31st of August, at 10.30, we left the metropolis of Eng- 
land and of the world. A vehicle that has within the 
Jast fifteen years become popular in this part of the 
universe conveyed us from the joyous piazza quad- 
ranta di Regento to the Stazione Euston-square. 
Our party consisted of a Contadina with the loveliest 
type of Saxon infancy taking its meek siesta like a 
lamb upon the pasture where it had been feeding. 
Beside her sate a hard-visaged discontented cord- 
wainer, evidently her husband, and possibly the father 
of her babe. He was dressed in the picturesque cos- 
tume which distinguishes the inferior classes in this 
country, who are prevented (whether by poverty or 
by legislative enactment, I have not been able to learn) 
from assuming the scarlet coats and plumed casques 
and glittering cuirasses, which may be seen lounging 
about the Guardi Cavallieri in Hallo Bianco and which 
(as my assiduous Varlet de Place informed me) indi- 
cate the hereditary nobility of this aristocratic coun- 
try. The cordwainer wore sort of trowser made of 
fustian, reaching to the instep, but turned up in a 
picturesque manner at the ancle — I presume to dis- 
play the blue worsted sock or stocking which is not 



48 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

infrequently worn even by the poor. A waistcoat of 
somewhat exhausted features, but still retaining traces 
of the looms of Somersetshire, descended to his waist, 
and a body coat of homely brown, from the fleeces of 
Southdown and dyed in the vats of Huddersfield, with 
tails and pockets behind, together with a kind of hat 
made from a preparation from the cocoon and called 
here a * gossamer,' completed his attire, which you may 
be sure I scrutinized with greedy interest. I do not 
think they detected me to be a foreigner, for the man 
asked me ' at what time the train started,' and betrayed 
no surprise or amusement when I replied * at half-past 
ten.' It might be my own speculating and romantic 
fancy, but as I looked upon that group, I could almost 
have believed that they had come up from some neigh- 
bouring place not far distant to spend their Sunday 
with a relation in London, and were now returning. 

" But I am allowing myself to be betrayed into 
detail which would exhaust my paper to the exclusion 
of more important facts. We reached Derbe at two, 
and Lystra a few hours after — at least I presume the 
latter to be the name of the town at which we next 
alighted. I dined in the evening at a villa near the 
romantic town whose name is at the head of this sheet. 
The cheerful faces that gleamed upon me in the corri- 
dor made me feel almost at home. As the huge clock 
of San Pietro, echoed by those of San Paolo and Santa 
Maria, sent its announcement of seven o'clock along 
the romantic valley called Abbey Dale (which is close 
in the neighbourhood of South Borneo) we sate down 
to a repast consisting of cold cow flesh, roasted at the 
fire of the country and served upon a sort of earthen- 
ware which carries a high polish and is adorned with 
blue figures of a bridge with three people passing over 
it, a Chinese villa, and two amorous birds upon the 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 49 

wing, billing in the air. This was accompanied by 
boiled tubers, very palatable bread, small cucumbers 
steeped in vinegar, and for beverage a decoction of 
barley, not disagreeable to the taste, but which when 
drunk in considerable quantities has an effect upon 
the party, not fatal but inconvenient, being accom- 
panied by a sort of delirium in which before coming 
entirely round the victim will sometimes fancy him- 
self locked up in a station-house, carried before a 
magistrate, fined 5s. and taken home in a fly. Well, 
but you are getting tired of this ! 

" Thus the uneventful flight of time has brought me 
to Tuesday the 8th, when I have the pleasure of your 
letter. I have forgotten all this time to acknowledge 
the one from Bolzen, though, as I think that was the 
one that related your profligacy with the Austrian 
Whiskerandos, you may have inferred that I got it. 
I liked the Bolzen detour. It seemed wild and queer 
and I daresay will supply as much dreamy and ro- 
mantic retrospect as more comfortable meanderings. 

" One thing by the bye gives me exceeding pain, 
which is this, you tell me of no flirtations in your 
letters. Now as to your travelling to Venice and back 
without a flirtation, you may tell that to the marines ; 
and your shrouding it in secrecy leaves my imagination 
to work itself into horrors." 

In another letter of the same period he said — 

" I have not heard from you independently nor by 
others. I mention this not by way of row, but merely 
as fact, for when the transit of a letter is a little doubt- 
ful mention should be made (like Archbishop Thorpe's 
question in examination, ' What does Aristotle say 
upon this, and what does he not say ? '). At 10.30 to 
Miss Coutts (as old Pepys would say). It seemed 



50 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

rather more select than before. The Gros Herzog von 
Waterloo (the Duke of Wellington) Grafs and Grafines^ 
the Bischofhn von London and Fraulein Bloomfeldt, 
Milman and wife, also Rogers. What a fool Lady 

G is ! As I was going at 11.30, she retained me 

to help her to her carriage at 12.30, which, of course, 
I was bound to do. Gaye just now is as jealous as if he 
had not to his comfort that highest form of religion 
known by the name of Puseyism." 

Later he records — 

" Returning from the post I found Thackeray and 
Crowe waiting with a cab to take me to Greenwich 
to make a beast of myself. I declined, having sermon 
on mind. I staid in every minute of a monstrous hot 
day trying with very ill success to write on ' I reckon 
that the sufferings, etc' I am not sure that the 
Devil had not been despatched from his place to urge 
me to be rather striking after Manning (who had used 
same text) and Wilberforce, whose popular (but not 
unapproachable) declamation was ringing in people's 
ears. In consequence of this wickedness I could not 
get on at all. Then came Tottie's, far more agreeable 
than I had expected. Old Tottie's criticism of Sly 
Sam was that it was a most able and effective discourse 
and contained nothing that a person of any set of 
opinions could possibly take any exception to. At 
twelve next day recommenced the hopeless and halting 
sermon. I had an old and abandoned one upon the 
subject from which I preserved only one sentence. 
At about five the butter began to come, and at eight 
I finished. Grubbed, then went to Venables by a 
sort of appointment. Preached early next day, ' Be 
sure your sin will find you out.' Goodish, but ill put 
together. It is a very bad plan to take others' sermons 



THE FRIEND OF THE ''APOSTLES'* 51 

as the basis of one's own and place portions in whether 
they harmonize or not. Mem. : never to do so no 
more. This was one of them — from Trench, but 
neither hke him nor me. P.M. The sermon came 
off well. Young Prendergast in amazement made such 
wonderful report upon it that I got invited to the Break- 
fast next Thursday ! Good-bye. Come back brown, 
stout and sparkling." 

A few days after writing the above he went to hear 
Manning preach and records with satisfaction, " Man- 
ning was Manning-ish — had cribbed a whole third of 
his sermon from Newman." This was in 1846, and 
Newman was now a Catholic. The moment Brookfield 
i-eahzed that if he himself followed the " Movement " 
closely, he was " like to go too far, which he felt sure 
he was apt to do," he put all deeper study of Church 
History and theology away from him, and merely 
noted with a hght touch all that struck him as eccentric 
in connexion with it. At the time he was wavering 
he had a rector, the Rev. J. G. Ward, of St. James', 
Piccadilly, who was one who crushed down high flights 
and tolerated no thoughts in his curates save orthodox 
and standard ones. " We have had due laughter," 
Brookfield once said, " at a comphment of curate Row- 
land to rector Ward last Sunday morning : ' I liked 
your sermon. Sir, very much. There was no nonsense 
in it.'" 

At the end of a letter to Miss Elton he mentioned — 

" I am scandalized at the sudden recollection that 
while I was drinking spiritual Hyson in company with 



52 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES'* 

the unspeakable (Lord John Manners) and Lord Give, 
and talking about poetry and Newman and human 
destiny and things which Angels would have been 
glad to hear and partake in, you were drinking Negus 
at the Baird's, and that Ash Wednesday was the day 
you chose for such a disposal of yourself. It is no 
marvel that with red eyes and trembling hands you 
expected an unkind letter from me. However, I 
leave you to your own conscience ! It strikes me I 

am writing a very stupid sort of letter however, 

* I am but human tho' I write M.A.' ' Take care of 
yourself. Be obedient. Live by Rule,' by which you 
must suppose me to be saying ' Goodden,' Newman- 
ically." 

Some days after this, he — 

*' Dined at Harriet's, and overheard a person in an 
adjoining box discuss Church matters and conclude 
with this admirable observation : * I think the 
Bishops are beginning to learn what it would be well 
if they had learned a little sooner, namely (very pom- 
pously) that religion was made for man and not man 
for religion.' Went forth to seek Venables. We talked 
chiefly about the desecularization of Clergy, with 
which he disagreed. We are all alike, the piousest 
and the profligatist. I believe there is very little 
difference between you and Lady Duff-Gordon, and 
very little between me and Dr. Pusey — all vanity and 
vexation of spirit — walking in a vain shadow and 
disquieting ourselves in vain." 

At a meeting a few nights after he complains that 
there was " Great bitterness — Oxford Tracts, and I 
had to be somewhat on my guard. Heard that at 
Oxford on a young man being drowned his friends all 



THE FRIEND OF THE '^APOSTLES" 53 

gathered round him and had a ' prayer-meeting ' tor 
his soul." He mentions that he saw engraved upon 
the gate of a " Puseyite " Church : *' This is none 
other than the gate of Heaven/' and pasted be- 
low it an inscription written by the Beadle : "In 
consequence of the inclemency of the weather this gate 

is closed until further notice." " I met " he goes 

on to say/' A , opinionated, obstinate, impractic- 
able. He began talking very liberal — no partizan- 
ship, etc., but very quickly the cloven hoof of Puseyism 
appeared. This fellow was not long ago an ultra- 
evangelical — he is now distinctly Oxford Tract. To- 
day I went to listen to old 's preaching ; he had 

the face to tell us ' fasting did not consist in maceration 
but was merely an external mortification.' " 

" How enraged I should have been at ' their Bibles,' 
* Mr. Newman and his party,' etc., as if their Bibles 
had anything to do with it, excepting as each party 
may choose to interpret them. I have no doubt I 
shall hate the Edinburgh article almost as much as 
I do the High Church and the Low Church and the 
Church between the two. I do not think any events 
have darkened our horizon, domestic, political, or 
social, to which I need make further reference — as 
to the Ecclesiastical it is all dark as pitch. Give 
my best and most reverential love to his honour" (Sir 
Charles Elton), " and tell him I wish I were disputing 
with him (like a Calvinist or Armenian) whether the 
wine we were drinking was a Batch or a Vintage. It 
was just like a controversy whether substantiation 
should be spelt with a ' tran ' or a * con.' I never 
knew any bit of Shakespeare's nonsense more pro- 



54 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES'' 

foundly sagacious than 'Slender' declaring that he 
would never get drunk again but in honest godly 
company." 

When he preached a mission on behalf of the S.P.G. 
throughout Somerset in 1846, he kept his wife informed 
as to which amongst his hosts had read Carlyle and 
which Tennyson, and also which of them were 
Evangelical and which " Pusey " and Oxford. At 
the same time he said, '* In moving thanks yesterday 
for the Bishop of Barbadoes' sermon, the Dean of 
Wells gave out that he considered the principal object 
of Cathedral establishment was to reward literary 
merit ! I shall tell Thackeray ! " 

Brookfield found time to read most things. One 
day he went through The Broad Stone of Honour, 
Trench's The Tares, a sermon of Newman's, Indi- 
viduality of the Soul, and in bed Cymheline. While 
recording this day's occupation he observes that 
Douglas Jerrold, after reading Harriet Martineau's 
book, exclaimed, " There is no God — and Harriet is 
his prophet." He was always charmed, no doubt by 
the irrelevancy and lack of humour in the '* Verses by 
a Poor Man," and never gave a line from that quaint 
production without prefacing the quotation with 
'* Really by a Canon of Durham ! " 

" Read Mansfield Park (which ends with Edward 
Bertram taking possession of the living of Mansfield). 
After finishing I reached down the Clergy List to see 
what was the value of the Living. Surely this is a 
compliment to the realizing powers of Miss Austen." 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES^' 55 

" As to Newman's conversion/' he said at the time, 
" I have not heard a word save from Thackeray, who 
came with the news. He told me all you report and 
more, and with what we could put together of the 
subject we sate all night." 

Thackeray and Brookfield together were what was 
called " great company." Each had the power of 
drawing out what was best in the other. For theirs 
was an [attachment brought about by similarity of 
humour and honesty of disposition. 

Thackeray admired Brookfield with the ardour of 
a generous nature ; he loved to hear him talk, and 
would unweariedly listen to him a whole night through. 
He went to hear his sermons and his readings when- 
ever he could ; he loved his wit and took it up and used 
it and illustrated it ; as also, by the way, did Leech. 
Brookfield returned Thackeray's affection and loved 
the man and liked his work. He always saw the 
great author whenever he was in his church, and 
pleased and flattered would note the fact and endeavour 
to preach his best to him. After a spell of Thackeray's 
society he would fly to his works and re-read them with 
renewed interest. " Read a volume of Yellow Plush \ it 
is immeasurably amusing. He is quite first-rate in talent, 
kindness and humility," he wrote with fervent truth 
of him to a common friend. The two men were such 
companions that they were in the habit of invoking 
each other's advice upon most subjects ; and so inti- 
mate that in times of stress and difficulty they talked 
over together their confidential affairs and innermost 



56 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

thoughts. If one of them did not at the moment 
care for the company assembled at the other's house, 
he would patiently wait (sometimes in an unused room) 
until they had departed, when he would emerge and a 
brilliant and cheerful evening or night for themselves 
alone would ensue. Thackeray often " walked in 
the Park with Jane and self. Went away to dress. 
Came back with Doyle of the Morning Chronicle/' 
or with anybody he may have found awaiting him 
at his own house. " Returning from Church found 
Thackeray. He staid three hours. Went when 
Springrice came." " I have only seen Tidmarsh once 
. . . and that in the middle of the day/' Brookfield once 
bemoaned. This was at a time when he and Thack- 
eray were smoking too much and sitting up too late, 
and in an endeavour to break themselves of these 
habits had, for a period, forsworn each other's society 
— ^in the evening. " Thack," " Thackwhack," " Tid- 
marsh," '* Titmarch," " Tidmouse," '' Makepeace," 
" Peacemake," were some of the names Brookfield 
used to designate the great author. To his wife he 
once wrote — 

" A supernaturally duU dinner, with Sir Erasmus 
talking unmitigated radicalism opposite and a sucking 
dove from oxford talking you know what, at my side. 
Preached next day twice at St. Luke's. Bishop at 
Jimses, p.m. as he will be next Sunday. His sermon 
was about Baptism. Dreadfully straggling and 
wearisome (if indeed it be reverent, so to speak, 
to speak so of one's Bishop — if so be — ^withal, — 
anyhow,) but in the midst I observed a woman 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 57 

by the communion rails twitching her face in 
scorn till at length she took up a hat and 
came to my pew door and held it out, apparently 
to me, and exclaimed, ' There, take your hat, don't 
stay to hear such vice as that — he wants us to believe 
it's only children that's converted ! ' Of course, 
she was hustled off by the awestruck warden and all 
was calm again. This morning after Post I called 
on the Historian. The talk was mere chatter. I 
am to dine there to-morrow to see the Milnes Gaskells. 
The Peer's note was to put off our walk on Saturday. 
It concludes — ' Stalest pill dissolved in stagnantest 
ditch water is a faint image of the manner in which 
the Rev. pleaded the cause of the charity (Bur- 
lington) last Sunday.' I have not the least fancy for 
Mrs. Procter's Ball. Certainly not inasmuch as it may 
be literary, for it will be so far vulgar. The aristocratic 
literates are the tiresomest ; the publishing, the vul- 
garest people one meets. Even Thackeray is spoilt 
by being an author and with authors. I see no reason 
why any body shouldnot read Clarissa Harlowe — if they 
can, but reading all the Fathers through is nothing 
to it for a task ! " 

This grumble was written in 1844, and in it Brook- 
field perhaps only expressed the feehngs of the time 
with regard to the Hterary world. 

Once when he was complaining that he did not 
see enough of Thackeray, his wife said: ''Mr. 
Thackeray seems to eschew you in your pre- 
sent abode" (the vaults beneath St. Luke's Church 
where he then was living), *' but I had a letter 
from him to-day which is filled with praises of your 
mode of treating people's consciences and Mrs. Crowe's 



58 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

in particular." On which he repHed to her : " Thank 
ye for Tidmarsh's letter and praise. Tell him I still 
think him a much over-rated person." By and by, 
when Thackeray was hourly seeking him and they to- 
gether enjoying a time of happy companionship, he 
says : " Thackwhack said he never saw you looking 
better than at starting, Payne (Mrs. Brookfield's 
maid) he did not see ! How blind love is ! The 
amusement at Spedding's was not so much (as Thack- 
eray is pleased to impute) the observations that fell 
from parties, as the explosive appreciation of the same 
by W. M. T. who the moment that one let fall an 
innocent remark went off into such violent laughter 
that the sympathy was irresistible. We afterwards 
looked in at Mr. Hallam's, whom we accompanied to 
Mr. Venables', where we found cheerful and cheery 
Mr. Garden." 

To this Mrs. Brookfield replied : — 

''Mr. Thackeray seems in his friendliest mood with 
you — he does take fits and starts of coming to see us, 
I think^ though the friendliness is always there ready 
for use when the fit to show it also comes." 

It always gave Thackeray extraordinary pleasure 
to have Brookfield with him at Brighton — and once 
when they were walking, as was their custom, at night 
upon the beach, a man with a telescope accosted them, 
who would only say, when asked his price, " What 
you please, gents, what you please." Thackeray, with 
a twinkle, thought for awhile, then offered him sixpence 
for both of them to see ''Jupiter and Saturn." '^I 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 59 

canH do it, Sir. I can't do it at the price." On this 
occasion they dined at a strange inn, and were greatly 
amused when urged by the waiter to join the '' Nickle- 
by's," a club which was then holding a meeting there, 
" but we did not go." 

" Finished Old Curiosity Shop. Unredeemed trash," 
occurs now in the diary ; but whether the '' Nickleby 
Club " had put Brookfield out of touch with Dickens 
or whether this dislike to Dickens' novel arose out of 
faithful affection for Thackeray, unfortunately does not 
appear. Brookfield scarcely wrote a letter when Vanity 
Fair was coming out without some allusions to it ; to 
his wife he says — 

" The Nugent Wades invite me to the intolerable 
and unsustainable Clerical dinner for Monday the 
15th. They will adhere to the woman part of the plan, 
which spoils what is bad enough to begin with. It is 
very odd that people will not see the absurdity and 
incongruity of clergymen having wives. A capital 
Vanity this month — though quiet and void of action. 
Tell me if I must bring it." 

The ** Clerical Club " was one which came into 
being one evening at the Brookfields' house after an 
S.P.G. meeting there. A conversation happened 
to arise concerning parochial clergy and their 
families, when someone said the only opportunity 
that the London clergy had of familiar acquaintance- 
ship was at dinner-parties — and dinner-parties were 
very expensive things. On this, Ernest Hawkins 
(father of Mr. Anthony Hope), who was present, said : 



6o THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

" Why shouldn't we have a piece of plain beef Hke this 
which you are now giving us, Brookfield, and dine 
together, clergy and wives, without any fuss — just 
ordinary family dinner ? " This plan took with them 
all, and a club was then and there formed consisting 
solely of clergy and wives (young), and meetings were 
afterwards held in succession at members' houses, 
all the dinners being under sumptuary laws ! At first 
their numbers were seven, but when this was pres- 
ently increased to twelve, they confined their hospital- 
ity to clergymen only; ladies were invited to go 
in the evening, but this privilege they eventually 
declined. 

Thackeray and Brookfield were on various occasions 
after their college days up at Cambridge together. 
Once, when they were both engaged to go up to some 
election there, Brookfield received the following — 

Trinity College, March 7, 1849. 

" My dear Brookfield,— 

" We are big enough to hold both you and Thack- 
eray. I wish you would come on Saturday to dine 
with me — as late as you please. There is a train leaves 
London at 2.30. Let me know by return, and whether 
Thackeray will condescend to sleep in College. The 
invitation to dinner you will convey to him, or any 
other select spirit you may fall in with — our founder, 
of portly memory, expressly enjoins upon us the 
practice of hospitality. 

" You will hear of your rooms at the Porter's lodge. 

" Yours ever, 

" W. H. Thompson." 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 6i 

Mr. Arcedeckne, the prototype of Foker, piqued at 
being portrayed as in Pendennis, took every occasion 
of annoying its author by famiHarity of manner. One 
day when Thackeray was sitting in the smoking 
room of the Garrick, in his favourite attitude, his legs 
crossed, one foot pointed in the air, and surrounded by 
admirers, Foker advanced, and while hailing him with, 
*' Well, Thack, how are you ? " struck his match at 
the same time on the sole of the upturned foot and 
proceeded to light his cigar — a liberty which Thack- 
eray very much resented. It was he, of course, who 
on hearing Thackeray say he was feeling somewhat 
nervous as to the success of his lectures in America, 
called out, '' I'll tell you what you'll want Thack. 
You'll want a piano." 

Of the small news with which Brookfield kept his 
wife au counint the following are specimens — 

" Kensington, with Thackeray . Dined on the widow 
whose husband I took to the Gods (Goddards). She 
was tender and fat as widows are. They were both 
destroyed by the merciless gun of Elisha himself (his 
brother-in-law). Who would think it to look at him 
— though I expect to be eaten by a bear for the allusion 
— which incident will doubtless be followed by Thack- 
eray's conversion to the plenary inspiration theory. 
I ended the night with Spedding. To-day Lushington, 
Venables, Tennyson, all called. Thackeray was already 
here. All staid to a hugger mugger, but rather cheery 
dinner." 

Brookfield noted "with interest everything that per- 
tained to the theatrical life, and anything connected 



62 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

with its members ; he said : " I never met Tommy 
Moore but once. It was at a Breakfast at Rogers' 
— where were about a dozen notables, including 
Lord John Russell, the American minister, Milnes 
and others. I asked Moore if he ever went to the play. 
He said : ' No — I don't want to see the stage covered 
with Macreadys. Every actor imitates him so closely 
that you can't tell who is speaking.' " 

" I am always a good deal moved — not to tears — 
but I think a good deal about it, when an actress dies. 
Poor Clara Webster was very pretty and was a good 
deal talked about. Only three days before I had been 
reading bits of scandal about her ; as how can a pretty 
actress escape ; to-day she is dead — -and so stupidly." 

" Where I then went I would not give you the 
slightest hint in the world, but certainly Charles Mat- 
thews was excessively good in Used Up and Patter 
versiis Clatter. I did not believe he had so much talent 
as ' a mime.' His wife is merely astonishing that she 
can at her age present anything tolerable ; but leav- 
ing out the word ' considering ' I don't think her a 
wonder. I sate next a person whom I have often seen 
begging in the streets — a fineish looking old man with 
flowing white hair and beard — who stands with lucifer 
boxes making very polite bows, but not actually beg- 
ging. He conversed quite affably with his neighbours 
— tho' I did not happen to speak — and he had all the 
air of an amateur. 

'* To-day I am not going to do anything striking. 
But at IQ I daresay Tidmarsh will look in for a little 
of the associated produce of Trinidad and Geneva." 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FRIEND OF THE '' APOSTLES " {continued) 

But thee, sweet hour so pensive, soft and lone, 
Thee, Holy Memory still shall call her own, 
StUl by thy moonlights' fair congenial ray 
Of bygone years with kindred joys shall stray. 
Hail the past day's more chastened splendour, yet 
In thee reflected tho' its sun is set ! 

(W. H. Brookfield.) 

As an Inspector of Schools, Brookfield struck out a 
line of his own — to the bewilderment of the Privy 
Council Office. He saw the errors of the educational 
methods of those times, but he knew that, were he 
merely to draw attention to them in the conventional 
way, no active steps would be taken to correct them. 
He accordingly embodied in his official reports any 
humorous replies or incidents which came under his 
notice during his examination of pupils and teachers, 
which illustrated, or drew attention to the defects of 
the prevaihng system. These novel blue-books at- 
tracted a vast amount of notice, and brought about 
considerable reforms. 

" One boy," he says, " wrote : ' Dr. Johnson after 
trying many other experiments married a widow with 
£800 a year.' Another gave me valuable historical 

63 



64 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

information. ' Julius Csesar/ he said, ' was an emi- 
nent Roman Catholic descended from a high plebeian 
family.' ' George the Third/ records another, ' was 
the longest sovereign that ever reigned.' * Great 
advances in civilization,' wrote a teacher in her first 
year, * were made in Elizabeth's time, but still poor 
Mr. Lee, a clergyman of Nottingham, broke his heart 
because not one in a hundred wore stockings.' " But 
the human touch of a smart young schoolmistress 
pleased him the most. She wrote with pious convic- 
tion : — " Eve lived a life of innocence until she fell 
under the influence of Satin." 

A fellow Inspector (Moseley) once told him in the 
presence of a school council that an unusually efficient 
assistant had been sent him from the P. C. O. to watch 
against copying at examinations. " I," said Brook- 
field, *' saw by his eye that there was more behind. 
When we were alone he told me that the man sent down 
was stone blind, but had a tremendous pair of eyes 
which he rolled about to the dismay of the students ! " 

His reports were sent to all his friends. John Forster 
wrote in regard to one of them — 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" Many thanks to you for your Report. The delight- 
fully humorous anecdote, so genially and pleasantly 
told (Dickens was here when it came, and had a hearty 
laugh at that), is but a small part of the pleasure it 
has given me. Everything in it is so good — the argu- 
ment thoroughly sound, the suggestions were so valu- 
able, and of wide applicability, the tone so kind and 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 65 

good-humoured, the illustrations so entertaining and 
agreeable. There never were such capital reports as 
yours. For once officiality becoming a thing to be 
respected and attended to. Unaffectedly I cannot 
help boring you with this — and I am sorely tempted 
to ask whether, if I applied to Mr. Lingen (whom I 
know, and who would be civil to any request within 
reason, I fancy), he could put me in the way of get- 
ting your former reports. 

" I ought not to close my note without saying (in 
fact I am asked to say it) with what unusual interest 
and pleasure my wife also has read this production of 
Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 

" With kind remembrances to Mrs. Brookfield, 
" Ever most truly yours, 

" John Forster." 

Caroline Lyttelton told him that at her village 
school where she once asked a child " What is your 
duty towards your betters ? " she got in reply, " To 
keep their hands from picking and stealing." 

" A gentleman," Brookfield says, '' informed me 
that, * in anticipation of my visit to Morden the school- 
master there had hanged himself,' and added, as a polite 
afterthought, ' This shows the value of inspection.' " 

He was remarkable for his happy choice of words ; 
he had indeed " a perfect command of apt words 
and apt tones," and frequently dilated upon their 
importance. He and Trench, in early days at Botley, 
often talked over their varying values together. No- 
body had a greater craving than he for the mot juste. 

To his wife he once said — 

5— (2318) 



66 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

" If you will go driving yourself about the country 
(when there are plenty of coachmen out of place) 
lugging away at the reins, pitching into horses off and 
near with the whip, whipping behind, getting off the 
box now and then to bear up your near leader — you 
must expect the inconveniences of a few aches and 
pains. Now if you would be more feminine and get 
into the carriage instead of on the box, and take a 
quiet lady-hke ' ride ' (as your friends say, but never 
let me hear you say it) — you would be able to hold a 
pen and write a longer and better letter to your widowed 
rib than he is at this hurried moment able to write to 
you." 

On his first visit to Paris in 1834, he observed— 

" I went to the Grand Opera. It was Don Juan. 
This opera was much talked of, but I was disappointed. 
The orchestra was the greatest I ever heard — the 
theatre pretty enough, but no larger than Covent 
Garden. There was no crowding, only tickets issued 
according to the number of seats. Snobs go early, 
buy pit tickets at the usual price, come out and beset 
comers at a quarter past seven to give them 5J francs 
for their tickets. So did we." 
/ 

/ '' Cad," in those days signified merely an omni- 
bus conductor. " Snob " was a poor low fellow ; but 
both have changed their significance. Thackeray 
startled everybody when he said, " the real snob 
was the man who pretended to be what he wasn't, and 
not he who wore trousers with no straps to them." 

\ Brookfield noted that " the word ' important ' has a 
peculiar meaning with Popular Preachers. The Rev. 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 67 

J. M. C. Bellew once wrote to request me to officiate 
in his absence at St. Philip's, Regent Street. He said, 
' the congregation is important ' (i.e. contained many 
people of rank and consideration), " but I shall be 
perfectly satisfied if you will, etc' " 

" I knew," he said, '' a curate whose notions of 
meanness were peculiar — he spoke of another clergy- 
man as a mean man ; he had called upon the Curate 
and his wife . . . and had never asked to see the 
Baby ! " 

That he sometimes bewildered people is shown by 
one of his brightest correspondents, Mary Campbell, 
who said to him in the course of a brilliant effusion — 

" I am suffering from bombardment on the brain, 
brought on by some lines on the battle of Balaklava 
by one A. T. and the criticisms thereon (by one you 
wot of) which are amusing : — 

Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them. 

" ' Mere jingle of words ! ' * Take the guns' is what 
Nolan said.' * I couldn't have written anything 
more prosy myself,' etc. Some one timidly suggests 
that the way in which they are read makes some 
difference — but is put down by the assurance that 
' no mortal with a grain of common sense,' etc., etc. 

" Like all imaginative people you are pleased to 
fancy that every body else knows as much as you do. 
Poor Hartley Coleridge when talking metaphysics to 
our good old Aunt as she knitted her stockings, used 
to illustrate them thus : * Plato, you know, ma'am, 
says ' — ending with a Greek quotation, and so you 



68 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

speak of Charles Reade, and to throw further light on 
him add, ' a coadjutor of Tom Taylor's.' It is as bad 
as our old nurse, who would repeat, * This is the house 
that Jack built/ all in a breath, and to our eager in- 
quiries as to who Jack was, would only tell us, * That 
is not a proper question ! ' Who is Charles Reade, 
really ? And who is ' Tom ' Taylor ? " 

The cultured Lyttelton family were also purists 
concerning words and probably encouraged Mr. 
Brookfield in his classic taste. When the word 
" elegant " was once obviously misused in his presence 
he reminded himself that long years before, Sarah, Lady 
Lyttelton, had said to him of somebody they both 
knew, " She is, if the expression were justifiable, 
which it is not, an elegant woman." 

To his wife, whose selection of words he sometimes 
envied, he said — 

" I have no such forcible one-worded-ness as you ; 
nor would terse Tacitus himself if he lived in these 
days in the same house as the old gentleman who is 
prating overhead and who feels towards words as 
Andrew Brigstock does towards horses, and will never 
be content to drive one if he can get four, I could not 
keep pace with you had I a team of six — or even a 
span of oxen — but I see I am rather sticking in the 
mud of my own pleasantry." 

His stories of the clergy were good and varied. Of 
W., an old College acquaintance, he told that he was 
in Orders against his will, and very fond of the Army. 
A recruiting party on some occasion passed through his 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 69 

parish, and the next morning W was discovered 

rather tipsy with a bunch of recruit ribbons in his hat. 
The Sergeant behaved very well about it — but it 
happened a second time and W. was suspended. 

** Carus," he used to say, " after a wine-party at his 
room (Sir I. Newton's) at Trinity, turned with a smirk 
to the undergraduates there assembled, and said, 
" And now shall we have a word or two of prayer ? " 
Then went to the door and turned the key and, 
with another smirk over his shoulder, simpered, ''For 
fear of the Jews." 

" A clergyman preaching a funeral sermon on a 
Bishop closed a highly eulogistic discourse by saying : 
' The many virtues of this prelate could not be summed 
up in more concise words than these, namely, * He 
lived the life of a Taylor and died the death of a 
Bull.' " 

The Bishop of Worcester once told him that when 
he was incumbent at Brighton a certain man wagered 
to run so many miles and to eat his breeches within 
the hour. But the knowing fellow had a pair of the 
said garments made of tripe and won his wager ! The 
same Bishop related that the Bishop of London told 
him he was one day alighting from his horse in Town 
when he was accosted by a man in lank hair, who said, 
" Aren't you my Lord Bishop Ryder ? " '' Why," said 
the Bishop, " I was five minutes ago, and shall be as 
soon as I mount my horse again, but meantime I am 
Bishop of London." 

About a certain Mrs. S. (who told him " she could 



70 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

not remember the time when she was not a true 
servant of God ! ") he said — 

" In my opinion she is neither drunk nor mad. That 
is to say, she is not madder than the greater number 
of the self-complacent religious world, but had rather 
lost control over her vanity, which vanity itself was 
only on a par with many other people's ; not far 
different, for instance, from that of Knight, the Quaker 
wine merchant, below Bar (Southampton), who wrote 
a letter in the newspaper, which I saw, explaining 
that he could not conscientiously engage in worship 
with the Church of England and the ' miserable 
sinners,' as he did not consider himself either one or 
the other." 

When one of the St. James' curates was complaining 
he never was allowed to preach in the season as often as 
he wished, Mr. Brookfield sighed, " Ah ! A word in 
the season, how good it is ! " 

From a letter we get : 

" This day I have been to keep Gunpowder Day at 
St. James'. Think of this ! You know, of course, 
that it is not a popular celebration with the Pusey- 
ites ; and when I got into Ward's this morning, Ward 
told me, not without sniggers, that Thompson (curate) 
had begged Turner (curate) to take his place as himself 
and Mrs. Thompson were going to sit for their portraits 
this morning ! Ward laughed, but called Thompson 
' a sneak.' Haslewood preached for me last night, 
and in the application of his sermon asked in the most 
impressive manner ' Is there here a mother — or a wife— 
or a mistress ? ' " 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 71 

Robert Montgomery (he who told Brookfield he 
thought he could " adapt the gospel to the West End," 
if given a living there), travelled once through Vevey 
just before the Rev. J. M, Campbell, a friend of his 
own who succeeded him in his living and who told the 
tale, and who found in Montgomery's handwriting, 
" on the wall, I think," says Brookfield, the following 
valuable testimonial : " The earth is the Lord's and the 
fulness thereof Robert Montgomery'' 

A lady, a friend of the Brookfields, in the course 
of exploring the house of a very evangelical nobleman, 
after admiring room after room, exclaimed : '' And 
to think that he has the Kingdom of Heaven 
besides." 

When some Whig Bishop was elected in or about 
the year 1845, Brookfield heard Robert Wilberforce 
say of the newly-elected, *' he is a man absolutely 
ignorant of Christianity, but not hostile to it." 

Once he wrote to his wife : " I quite agree in your 
High Church theory that the Clergyman's place is, etc. 
etc., but admire no less the truly Protestant doctrine 
prevalent in the days of Oliver that he is at liberty to 
place the Altar wherever he likes, and I further think 
that you were quite right in fixing it at the Miss Berry's 
on Wednesday. Lord Glenelg (in fancy dress) must 
have been a great sight ; but on the whole, I incline to 
think that Hallam chewing up Alfred's pine-apple jam, 
after grandly refusing it, might have been greater." 
This was concerning a visit which Mrs. Brookfield, 
with Henry Hallam (the historian and her uncle) and 



72 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES/' 

his daughter paid to the poet, who was then Hving at 
Twickenham. Hallam had refused to eat the confiture 
in the Poet's presence (it had been sent to him by an 
admirer), but during the drive back to London "chewed 
up " almost the whole of it, 

Brookfield was a favourite guest of the Ashburtons, 
who were never so happy as when they had him and 
his companions with them. He remarks once : " Dined 
at home. Afterwards to Lady Ashburton's, where Lord 
A., Venables, Poodle Byng, Spedding, Milnes, Lushing- 
ton, G. Bunsen, Carlyle and wife and ourselves. We 
talked of epitaphs. At Birmingham there is to be 
found : 

"This sod hath, drunk the widow's tear, 
Three of my husbands he buried here." 

Again he says : " We dined at the Carrick Moors. 
Maurice, Rajah Brooke, Spedding, etc. The Rajah 
was in good spirits, exceedingly pleasant, and seemed 
to have sufficient of the humorous 'element. After- 
noon I preached at the Temple, ' I know whom I have 
beheved.' Very full. Lord Brougham made a sensa- 
tion by shufiiing into the Treasurer's place just after 
service had begun. It was quite touching to see him. 
Lady Ehzabeth Dalrymple was there. She told me 
after, that as Lord Eldon used to be the friend of the 
Church, but never went inside one, so Lord Brougham 
who hates the Church never missed. He had been at 
Whitehall this morning ! " 

Greville in his diary says — 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 73 

" A magnificent sermon from Brookfield. He lately 
said to a friend of mine, ' Believe me, that in our Church 
there is a great demand for dulness ! ' I think he is 
quite right." 

** Dined with Venables at Oxford and Cambridge 
Club. We were Monteith, Garden, F. Lushington, 
Sir James Simeon, H. A. Mereweather. Exceedingly 
pleasant. Some one told that Sydney Smith when 
dying said, 'Ah, Macaulay will be sorry when I am 
gone that he never heard my voice. He will wish 
sometimes he had let me edge in a word.' " 

'' Windsor, May 13, 1866. Read afternoon prayers 
in the private chapel, which I did not attend — nor 
Queen either. At 4.30 I attended St. George's Chapel 
with Mrs. Wellesley. At 8 we dined. Dean and wife. 
Lord Cadogan and son (at Eton) and self. Mrs. 
Wellesley poured out a spoonful of water and added 
salt to it in place of melted butter with her asparagus. 
I said,' That is to me quite a new dodge.' She said the 
Queen had been in great perplexity to hear of any- 
body that did it — adding that she had never known 
anybody that did it. ' Oh, ma'am, I have known 
people that did it.' ' Indeed ! It is very surprising,' 
said the Queen.* " 

At a dinner at Lord Granville's he once took Lady 
Dufferin in and sat between her and Lady Canning. 
" I made a funny mistake as to Lady D. being Lord 
D.'s wife instead of mother, but she only said (colouring 
very prettily) ' I will look over it,' and shook hands 
very cordially at parting." 

" Stirling of Keir," he says (afterwards Sir William 



74 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Maxwell, married later to Mrs. Norton), ''had all 
manner of humour — that of punning amongst 
the rest. One day he took Alfred and Miss 
Seymour (Lady Rawlinson), John Fortescue, and 
myself in a drag to Dunmore Castle, punning all the 
way. Arrived there, the head gardener was very 
assiduous in showing us everything. We arrived at 
an indifferent lily with a fine name. ' Pray, Mr. 
Mackenzie,' said Stirling, ' Is this lily of any particular 
valley ? ' * Oh, no, sir, some eighteenpence or so.' " 

" I sate at dinner (30. 5. 1868) next an exceedingly 
pretty, good-tempered, but not very well instructed 
young lady, who spoke in a sort of rapid way, rather 
indicative of self-consciousness. She got upon Ten- 
nyson and condemned him because ' all his ideas are 
alike,' and she should like to know what he meant by 
the ' Eggs of the Moon.' She must have heard some- 
body refer to two lines in Aylme/s Field, for it is not 
likely that she had read it. So to humour her mistake 
I said, * Oh, you mean the lines — 

All addled, like the stale eggs of the Moon 
Smelt in the music of the nightingale. 

The nightingale only lays one egg a month, and hers 
are therefore called Moon's eggs.' ' Ah, I understand it 
now, but I never did before you repeated it ! ' " 
The real lines being : 

But where a passion yet unborn perhaps 
Lay hidden as the music of the moon 
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale. 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 75 

** To Mrs. Milnes Gaskell, where Archbishop Manning, 
Lord Wensleydale, etc. Amusing to see the eagerness 
of young ladies to be made acquainted with the R. C. 
prelate. Afterwards to Lady Russell's. A great 
crowd, but it did not appear to contain much cream 
of the cream, only abundance of one's own personal 
acquaintance. Probably 600 persons there." Here 
he comments soberly. " Amongst the great, real 
blood and breeding even without its accidents of 
wealth and power are reverenced ; not so the real 
aristocracy of intellect, which without its accidents of 
reputation goes for nothing." 

" Lord Cowper at dinner to-night. Very pleasant 
and amusing, but oudacious flattering. The most 
flattering thing told was that it used to be said of the 
late Lady Ashburton that she had had a tiff with every 
friend she had except Carlyle and myself. ' She told me,' 
said Lord Cowper, * that once she was at outs with 
Brougham, and meeting him at dinner happened to 
be placed in the chair next him, when she called out 
loud, ' Will any lady change places with me, for Lord 
Brougham and I don't speak." I inquired if this 
was the commencement of a reconciliation. * Not a 
bit of it ; not a bit of it.' Venables walked back with 
me as far as Cambridge House, where we fell in with 
Carlyle." 

" There's nothing equal to Carlyle," was Brookfield's 
favourite saying — a saying admittedly stolen from 
Lady Ashburton. After the death of Thackeray the 
two met by arrangement more often than they had 



1^ THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

done before, and were together whenever they could 
manage it ; for they entirely satisfied each other, and 
were at perfect ease in each other's society. Brook- 
field liked everything connected with Carlyle, his 
works, his appearance, his habits, — even his rough- 
nesses. Many were the hours of close intimacy passed 
together, when almost in silence they smoked, only 
speaking as the fit seized them. Carlyle sitting upon 
the floor, his back against the column of the mantel- 
piece — smoking energetically — one fist beating his 
knee, the other the ground ; or looking into Brook- 
field's face with sharp and introspective eyes, de- 
scribing past or present events in vigorous terms, 
illustrating them with gestures of the pipe ; humour 
and Homeric laughter flowing from them both when 
talk was gay ; profound philosophy or scathing dia- 
tribe when it was grave. 

The attraction between the two was the more extra- 
ordinary in that Brookfield admitted openly to a love 
for natures and manners of greater polish than his 
*' rough sage " possessed, but he had gauged the man 
and loved him long before he was a " lion." Another 
remarkable element concerning this attachment was 
that Brookfield had a friendship equally strong and 
equally sincere for Mrs. Carlyle, one of the happiest 
of his rare characteristics being that in any household 
where he had good footing he had the affection of 
every member of it. 

" I detect ashght affectation for the Carlyle dialect 
in part of this letter for which, ' I prithee, fellow mimic. 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES " 77 

mock me not/ " he said once to his betrothed. Here 
he was using the word coined by Milnes for Carlyle's 
style. He, himself, though he thought Carlyle " the 
salt of the earth," observed in early days, " He did 
not think Carlyle's style of language so well adapted 
to philosophical disquisition, as it was to graphic 
delineation." 

In the same letter he continues — 

" Ah, this Easter sunshine that is gilding our high 
festival over Christendom — that is shining on the 
budding spring — on peaceful villages, on happy holi- 
day groups, on sweetest family reunions ! how it is 
also at this hour quietly sloping upon quiet graves 
that were not digged last Easter. How many hearts 
are this day gladdened by its beams that ' ere another 
Easter will have ceased to beat,' which I only quote 
to refer you to the original words which you will find 
p. 242, vol. I, of French Revolution. They are not, 
however, an imitation of Carlyle, only suggested by 
him." 

While in reply she said — 

** How you do gloat and glower over Carlyle's 
French Revolution ! You must have it by heart." 

" Yesterday before dinner the veteran " (Sir Charles 
Elton) " fell into huge raptures with Heroism, and oddly 
enough suddenly asked me to read a page or two which 
he fixed on in imitation of Carlyle : he asked it seriously 
too, said it was for the purpose of giving him a new 
impression of it. Well, I had never heard Carlyle 
read and could only conjecture how he would give 
out his own writing. I was overwhelmed with difficulty, 



78 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

but nevertheless took heart — tried — and all said it 
was very like. I rejoice that you appreciate Carlyle 
as you do." 

Having learned that Carlyle had said that he had 
received a bushel and a half of letters on the news of 
his election as Rector of Edinburgh — and that " the 
one which had given him the most pleasure was Brook- 
field's," he says, '' I recalled it the day but one after 
written." It ran thus — 

" Dear Carlyle, — 

" I have hesitated a day or two to write lest like 
distant relatives remembering ' birthday of our dear 
cousin-thrice-removed, the Marquis of Fitz Carrabas,* 
I should seem to claim some portion of that spiritual 
affinity which is implied in the word cow-gratulation. 
On reflexion, however, the scruple seems to me more 
timid than generous, and I think that the sentiments 
which — now for many years — I have uniformly cher- 
ished towards the most serviceable writer of his day, 
as I esteem him, and much more towards the person, 
may entitle me to say that nothing — nothing I mean 
of such a nature as to be compared with it — ever gave 
me so much pleasure as the announcement of your 
election to the academic throne of Edinburgh. You 
have taught people not to overvalue demonstrative 
distinctions ; but it is a real pleasure to see mankind 
touching its hat to its heroes when it does find them 
out ; tenfold greater when the hero has never acceler- 
ated the process by enlisting drum and trumpet in his 
service. 

'' It will save you writing a line at a moment when 
there are many that you must write if you will let me 
interpret silence as consent that some evening in the 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 79 

coming weeks I may approach the shrine in Cheyne 
Row and burn there — as an act of homage — a few 
grains of that incense which, no longer tainted with 
the perspiration of a ' pecuhar institution,' grows 
upon the highly flavoured banks of York River. 
^' With best regards to the Frau Rector, 

" W. H. B." 

In his diary, Jan., 1866. — " Read at Bretton (Lady 
M. Beaumont's) an act of Macbeth and some Elia — found 
that the latter did not answer. Too stiff and pedantic 
in style, though the sentiments are exquisite." Some 
evenings later he was at the Carlyles' telling all that 
had happened to him, all that he had observed since 
last they met, acting each scene with different voices as 
he gave it out. He told them at last that Bretton had 
not responded to Lamb, when, " Carlyle remembered 
having known him a little about the year 1825, but 
spoke rather slightingly of him as a fatuity not worth 
consideration. Mrs. Carlyle repeated some very poor 
things of his saying." 

13 February, 1866. — *^At Tyndall's lecture on 
heat, I sat by Spedding. As we returned on foot 
Spedding told me that Carlyle is now 70, being four 
years older than somebody whom Spedding knows 
to have been born in 1800. We dined with Alfred 
and Mrs. Tennyson, Spedding and Venables. After 
dinner an evening party ! Duke and Duchess of 
Argyle, Lady Boyne, Mrs. Gladstone, the Lockyers, etc. 
etc. Spedding and Venables and myself staid behind 
to smoke with Alfred. 



8o THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

lyth February. ** To Lady Stanley of Alderley, 
where was a great crowd. Standing close together 
were to be seen Alfred Tennyson^ Browning, Hough- 
ton, and Carlyle, and by way of a not less remarkable 
group, Lord Shaftesbury and Sir Alexander Cockburn." 

A night or two after this, Brookfield told one of his 
hostesses, Mrs. Yorke, that in a quarter of a century he 
had rarely been at a dull dinner, to which she replied 
in such a manner that he " wondered at his own dull- 
ness in not foreseeing what she was bound to say." 

The Brookfields were amongst the last people who 
met and spoke with Mrs. Carlyle, and on her sudden 
death were in great distress to know how best to 
approach the bereaved old man. 

April 27, 1866. Brookfield writes : " Walking 
with Charlie " (his little son) " this morning, I met 
poor old Carlyle just opposite the Portrait Exhibition. 
He began immediately to talk about his loss. ' The 
last thing in the world that he was prepared for — no 
more expectation than if a bolt should be shot from 
the blue heaven and fall upon his head. Returned 
yesterday having done what was to be done. He and 
brother, and Twistelton, and John Forster, who had 
been, dear fellow, a great protection to me . . . Was 
not able to talk yet ; but after a while, etc.,' and so 
he squeezed my hand and went his way bursting with 
sobs and tears. Speaking of Carlyle to Greg, I as- 
serted him to be a profoundly religious man. * Oh, 
yes,' says Greg, ' that is always very noticeable when 
you find a man with a religion without a creed.' 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 8i 

" After dinner at the Speaker's. Carlyle told me 
that Q. had nourished his wife on George Sand. That 
they were once both together at C.'s, and talked very 
loosely about the conjugal relations — that C. had 
delivered some severe decision upon the subject and 
given them to understand that persons cherishing 
such notions had no place in decent society. . . ." 

Though of sociable habits Brookfield was an inde- 
fatigable worker. " The busy bee is a drone to me," 
he once said. His Preacherships were posts that 
suited his talents, and according to Greville and those 
who still remember him, " Nothing could be more 
eloquent than his language or more ingenious than his 
arguments." Venables, who could not go to one of 
his celebrated discourses on some celebrated occa- 
sion, wrote : '' Shght as is the abstract of your 
yesterday's discourse in The Times to-day it bears 
out what I heard last night of its beauty." 

Of his reading aloud there was also an unanimous 
opinion, which can be as well expressed in the words 
of Sir Frederick Pollock (an eminent ''Apostle") 
as in any others : — 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" When last night I de\dated from the path of virtue, 
I knew that I was incurring a great loss in not hearing 
you at the Royal Institution. The consciousness of 
my error interfered with the guilty pleasures of the 
festive board, to which I had been summoned to ani- 
mate a coat and waistcoat. But I did not know how 
much I had lost until I came home and found my wife 
waiting and eager to tell me of your very beautiful 

6-(23i8) 



82 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

lecture and reading of that finest piece of pathos in 
any language, on hearing which it may be asked of 
every one — si non piangi, di che pianger suoti ? 

" She is in a state of dehght, and from her I have had 
the advantage (wholly unmerited by my conduct) of 
hearing whole pieces and sentences of what fell from 
you. 

" With my regards and congratulations to Mrs. 
Brookfield, 

'' I am, 

'' Yours ever truly, 

" Pollock." 

Brookfield's quaintnesses were as often as not 
turned against himself. When Cowie said to him that it 
was the warming of St. Paul's for the" Special Preachers" 
which had produced certain injuries to the roof of the 
Cathedral, he asked interestedly (himself a "Special 
Preacher "), " Was it not the dry rot ? " 

" When I was inducted into my honorary canonry 
of St. Paul's," he says, " the close of the ceremony 
brought me into the Vestry, where the officiating 
Canon solemnly presented me with a Bible, sa5ang, 
" This is provided for your spiritual sustenance . . . 
and this (placing in my hands a stale common penny 
roll) is furnished for your bodily nourishment." This 
roll represented the Prebend of Ealdland. It was 
difficult to keep grave." 

Brookfield attained no academic eminence. This 
was mainly due to temperament, but partly to the 
fact that he took up Classics, whereas we are assured 
by his contemporaries that his natural aptitude was 



THE FRIEND OF THE "APOSTLES" 83 

for Mathematics. However, if he failed to shine forth 
as a scholar himself he contributed to the brightness 
of other lights — for both his pupils, Lord Lyttelton 
and Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, testified by their 
words as well as by their achievements to his capacity 
as a tutor. 

It was not alone his brilliancy — and Venables, Sped- 
ding, and most of the '' Apostles " maintain he was 
'' the most brilliant of their lives' acquaintances " — 
which kept him the affection of that band. It was, as 
they all confessed, ** his strong and noble char- 
acter." 

For Brookfield's humour was not the mere ability 
to raise a laugh, but a more spiritual and far-reaching 
power — an admixture of tenderness and irony, the 
outcome of a strongly sympathetic and comprehensive 
nature. This gift, as well as others, won him the affec- 
tion and confidence of each of the remarkable men 
dealt with in this book. All of them, as the following 
sketches will show, loved and admired their "kindher 
trustier Jacques." 



CHAPTER V 

JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 

Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn, 

Edged with sharp laughter, cuts atwain 
The knots that tangle human creeds, 

The wounding cords that bind and strain 

The heart until it bleeds, 
Ray-fringed eyelids of the morn 

Roof not a glance so keen as thine : 

If aught of prophecy be mine, 
Thou wilt not live in vain. 

(Tennyson.) 

"'Clear-headed friend' is the most ludicrously flat 
beginning of a serious poem that we have ever seen 
proceed from a real poet. ... In the same verses 
' kingly intellect ' is at least in that connexion a phrase 
of vague rhetoric." 

When John Sterling wrote thus in an article on 
Tennyson, which he supplied to the Quarterly^ he 
was stating an opinion in much the same manner 
he would have stated it before the " Conversazione 
Society ; " and as he probably did state it at the 
time the lines were written : Tennyson, erect, giving 
forth his verses ore rotundo, appreciative *' Apostles " 
all around him — Sterling alone critical. It was the 
prosiness of the expression which offended, not the 




Joseph Ullliani Blakcslcy 

From a crayon drawing by Samuel Laurence, 1842 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 85 

epithet, which he, and all of them, knew to be pre- 
eminently descriptive of the intellectual, amiable, 
joyous Blakesley, to whom the poem was dedicated ; 
whose lucid insights and swift judgments were the envy 
as well as the admiration of some of his less acute 
brethren. The verses too were amongst the earliest of 
the Poet's college-day efforts — and if they have not the 
gracious finish of those that immediately follow, they 
show he had mature knowledge of character, and better 
still — the instinct of friendship. 

Joseph William Blakesley went to Corpus Christi 
at the end of 1827, having already attained high 
distinction at St. Paul's schools. His first year (1827-8) 
was a red letter year for him and for the University, 
for he found himself there " freshman " with Arthur 
Hallam and Alfred Tennyson ; and Cambridge saw 
as his companions Buller, Kemble, Milnes, Spedding, 
Sterling, and Trench ; Lushington, Venables and 
Brookfield were a year or so later. 

Blakesley, a fine classical scholar, immediately 
achieved distinction; he commanded the benign in- 
terest of the University authorities and assumed, by 
right of his " acute practical mind " and '' master 
intellect," a leading position amongst his fellows. 

He joined the ''Apostles" at Kemble's introduction, 
and at the Saturday discussions spoke with lucidity and 
decision. He was ever generous in debate ; he would 
allow his opponents as much latitude as they sought. 
But he was never to be caught by false logic ; with 
** joyful scorn " he broke up specious theories, with 



86 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

crystal clearness he would show the fallacy of following 
prophets who were hardly sure of themselves. He was 
not one of those who imagined that the human intel- 
lect was capable of reducing all the mysteries of philoso- 
phy and science into so many packets of component 
parts. He was — ^if such a thing could be, where all were 
mutually beloved, a favourite amongst the " Apostles." 
Kemble dehghted in his " equably minded Blakes- 
ley," and Tennyson said " he ought to be Lord Chan- 
cellor, for he is a subtle and powerful reasoner, and an 
honest man " ; with the others he was a friend whom 
they all loved as they admired him. When after a 
time he discovered that most of his friends and all of 
his interests were in Trinity, he decided to follow them 
thither ; thus bringing the whole of the set dealt with 
here — with the exception of Venables — within the 
precincts of one College. Even in so small a number of 
" Apostles " as this one particular band, it is possible 
to note the difference in the natures of them and the 
way they, with all their common causes, formed into 
natural cliques. Blakesley belonged to what may be 
called the poetic as distinct from the philosophic set. 
No matter how late they stayed over their coUocu- 
tions the " Apostles," most of them, would rise early 
on Sunday ; and, in batches of threes and fours, they 
would breakfast together, and afterwards take long 
walks. Blakesley loved these walks and talks perhaps 
better than any other of their meetings — for Nature 
spoke her story to him. Once he reminded Trench 
of one of these wanderings : — 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 87 

" Write to me soon. I have survived almost all my old 
friends in the University, and feel but little inclination 
to make new. Hardly a Sunday passes without my 
calling to mind how Kemble, you and myself used to 
breakfast together and afterwards to walk into the 
country, telling strange stories of the deaths of Kings. 
. . . The faithful" (namely, the " Apostles ") ''desire 
to be affectionately remembered to you." 

Another time he said : "I shall expect a letter 
from Kemble and yourself very speedily. Tell me 
all that you do and think in your delectable privacy. 
I shall not require news." This anxiety to know his 
friends' thoughts shows the mental attitude of all these 
young philosophers. They were constantly analyzing 
one another's ideas as well as their own, which doubt- 
less developed their intellectual sympathies, though 
sometimes, perhaps, at the expense of spontaneity. 

He was fond of Tennyson, and one of the first of his 
admirers, but he much disliked his smoking habits, 
and often grumbled concerning them : — 

** Kemble is in town; he is reading law five hours a 
day (or at least was doing so before Alfred Tennyson 
came up to town), for now these five hours are consumed 
(together with much shag tobacco) in sweet dis- 
course on Poesy, and besides this he finds time to 
write articles in the Foreign Quarterly and a book on 
Anglo-Saxon, without which he says no one can under- 
stand English, and which he says no one can understand 
without understanding the other Teutonic dialects." 

When Tennyson asked him, as he asked all his 



88 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES** 

friends, what he thought of his pubhshing his " Poems, 
chiefly Lyrical," Blakesley rephed : — 

" The present race of monstrous opinions and feel- 
ings which pervade the age require the arm of a strong 
Iconoclast. A volume of poetry written in a proper 
spirit, a spirit like that which a vigorous mind indues 
by the study of Wordsworth and Shelley, would be, 
at the present juncture, the greatest benefit the 
world could receive. And more benefit would accrue 
from it than from all the exertions of the Jeremy 
Benthamites and Millians, if they were to continue for 
ever and a day." 

Thus pithily conve3dng his personal estimate of 
those philosophies and their adherents. 

When Trench went " down," Blakesley commenced 
and carried on an intimate correspondence with him, 
and when he was in Spain, sent him " Apostolic " 
news. 

" You ought to come home. The salt of the earth is 
too scanty to allow of its being as yet scattered over the 
face of the earth. We have a handful of men in Cam- 
bridge who will continue the race of the Maurices and 
Sterlings, and cherish an untiring faith in the unde- 
feated energies of man. The majority of the Apostles 
are decidedly of the proper way of thinking, and 
the society is in a flourishing state. We are now 
twelve in number, and those whom we shall lose 
this Christmas are by no means the best. I think 
that we are now in a better state, and that the tone 
of our debates is higher than it has ever been since 
the giants were on the earth. . . . 

*' I told you that the Apostles were in a flourishing 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 89 

state. A society of the same kind has been estabhshed 
by Hallamat Oxford. . . . Milnes is now an Apostle. 
The society doth not, I think, gain much from him, 
but he will leave Cambridge in a few weeks. . . . 
The society had received a great addition in Hallam 
and A. T.,the author of the last prize poem — Timbuc- 
too — truly one of the mighty of the earth.' You will 
be delighted with him when you see him." 

The ''salt of the earth" was a phrase borrowed 
from Shelley 'and much used by the " Apostles " when 
under that poet's influence as well as afterwards. 

You will see Hunt, one of those happy souls 
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom 
The world would smell like what it is — a tomb. 

When Trench and Kemble were in Spain on the 
Torrijos business, Blakesley still fed them with Cam- 
bridge news. He, with his calm judgment, and Ven- 
ables, with his strong and equally balanced mind, 
were the two who were least in sympathy with that 
unhappy " cause," yet Blakesley followed the under- 
taking with interest, and wrote to Gibraltar in order 
to cheer the revolutionists when affairs there looked 
desperate ; for which Trench said gratefully to Donne— 

" Blakesley was a good boy and wrote me a letter. 
It was kind and subtle and mournful — a shrewd knave. 
Indeed, I look upon himself and you, Donne " (the Rev. 
W. Bodham Donne — also an Apostle) " as the only 
two amongst us who will not be brokendown traders 
before we are twenty-six." 



90 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES'' 

Blakesley took his degree in 1831, and club-making 
being in the air, " fathered a new debating society 
called the ' Fifty.' " He continued to be much as 
ever with the' Apostles/ " even after he had accepted 
a tutorship : and his sharp criticisms, delivered with 
unvarying amiability and utter absence of pomp, were 
ever welcome. 

It was when Blakesley was a tutor that he was once 
asked by a perplexed undergraduate, reading for orders : 
" Pray, Sir, do you consider that eternal punishment 
will consist in moral or in physical suffering ?" '' Why,' " 
said Blakesley, a little puzzled between the conflicting 
claims of orthodoxy, common sense and prudence, 
''I should incline to think moral." *' Oh, I am so 
relieved to hear you say so ! " 

To Trench, who had now taken orders, he wrote in 

1834- 

" The faithful here prosper. We have great hopes 
of being able in the course of the present term to add 
two or three very promising grafts on to the old stock. 
This is the more desirable, as, in my opinion, the 
Society is becoming rather too old — that is, the individ- 
uals composing it at present are so. . . . It is pos- 
sible you may not have seen a list of the new Trinity 
fellows. Three are of the number of the good and 
wise — Thompson, Lushington, and Afford — . . . 
We, of course, exult much in the election of Thompson. 
He made a great sensation among the examiners, and 
although he did not come in first, is considered by them 
as certainly the first man of the whole." 

It is curious to note the characteristic attitude of 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 91 

all these men, in their first youthful presumption, 
towards Carlyle. In the beginning, they spurned him 
with high disdain ; in the end, they one and all came 
round to him, and sat at his feet in awe and admira- 
tion. Blakesley — always good friends with Milnes— 
was found, after he had come to the knowledge of 
Carlyle's worth, writing and begging that gentleman 
to get names of people who were wilhng to purchase 
Sartor Resartus, saying — 

" It seems the booksellers will not reprint the work 
unless they can be sure of selhng three hundred copies. 
I should have thought the cormorants had picked 
enough from the bones of successful authors to allow 
them to take poor Carlyle's carcase for better for 
worse." 

Brookfield when he first entered the Church had a 
craving to become a Navy chaplain. To Blakesley, 
who exerted himself to procure him a nomination, 
he wrote as follows — 

" Southampton, 

''December 2, 1839. 
" My Dear Blakesley, — 

" I have this morning received a letter from Lyttel- 
ton acquainting me with your thoughtful kindness 
in offering to propose me for the Chaplaincy of the 
Blonde ; but at the same time rightly conjecturing 
that the time is gone by for my accepting the situa- 
tion. Three years ago such an opportunity might 
perhaps have seriously affected my destinies — but 
now I have undergone a change outward and inward — 
by which I only mean in stomach and in circumstances 



92 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

— which render salt junk and grog and the parochial 
confines of a 46 less adapted than formerly to 
my tastes and aspirations. To be grave, I have 
lain long enough in the land of Lilliput to be bound 
down by many threads of habit and affection and 
ambition (I don't know that I mean anything defined 
by the last word — but it suits the rhythm of 
the sentence) which effectually hinder my being 
metamorphosed into a sea priest. Does a Chaplain 
wear fins ? and so all things considered — with every 
homage to Capt. Bourchier and H.M.S. Blonde, I must 
elect to brave a little longer the perils of tiles and 
chimneypots and die a dryer death. 

" I assure you that I feel sincerely grateful to you for 
remembering me in this matter and should be heartily 
glad of an opportunity of thanking you personally. 
If I were a little more contagious and had two cloaks — 
I think I should assay Xmas socialities of Trinity, but 
alas I am ^ remote — unfriended — melancholy — slow — ' 
and as poor as a Mendicant friar without his resources. 

"Do your occasions never bring you to such places 
as Southampton ? I am * but a Lodger/ but I have 
some Madeira and a friend that has credit with a butcher. 
If any sprightly kick from the foot of Destiny should 
lift you here I beseech you draw me and I will quarter 
you. I have with me a sort of half pupil, whole 
boarder, Lord Orford's second son aged 22. He is 
quite blind — but keeps a dog. I spent a few days 
very pleasantly with Charles Buller a few weeks ago 
at Sir Charles Hulse's in this county. He was in 
high feather — but had not imported so much fun from 
Canada as I expected. I not infrequently see Trench, 
who is only six miles off — I am going there for a few 
days next week. He has written delightful poems 
since he last published. All religious and chiefly 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 93 

legendary — from oriental sources made available 
through the sucking bottle of German translation. I 
have occasionally the pleasure of hearing of you but 
should be much happer if it were from you. 
" Ever yours very sincerely, 

*'W. H. Brookfield. 
'^Pray remember me heartily to deserving men of 
my knowledge that may be up — Thompson — Venables 
— the Master " (Wordsworth) '' and the rest — but who 
may be up I cannot conjecture." 

When young Lord Lyttelton went to Cambridge he 
was consigned by Brookfield, his late private tutor, to 
the charge of his old friend Blakesley ; and it was 
under his auspices that his lordship became in due 
course inducted as an " Apostle." When he was 
chosen to contest the post of High Steward with Lord 
Lyndhurst (considerably his senior) our " Apostles " 
past and present mustered in full force to support 
him and worked for him with unlimited energy and 
enthusiasm. Again there were wondrous meetings, 
" celebrations," and " magnificent talks," and such 
was their exhilaration at the fact of being once more all 
together, that they were but little dashed by their 
opponent's victory. 

Blakesley, as secretary at Cambridge to the Lyttel- 
ton Committee, wrote all the letters and notices con- 
nected with this election with his own hand. Lord 
John Manners (afterwards seventh Duke of Rutland, 
whose loss we have only recently had to deplore), 
chairman of the London Committee, organized the 
business of getting the members of the Senate to the 



94 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

poll, and gave gallant names to the coaches which 
were to carry those gentlemen from London to Cam- 
bridge. Brookfield was secretary to the London 
Committee, and a vast correspondence ensued between 
Cambridge and London. 

" Trin : Col : Cam : 

'^October 15, '40. 
" My Dear Bbookfield, — 

Hitherto we have been delayed in re Lytteltoni by 
the provoking silence of the M.C. who has neglected to 
answer a letter written to him up to the present moment. 
This morning however a notice has been sent forth by 
the Vice Master, calling upon the friends of Lord L. 
to meet to-morrow at one o'clock in the Combination 
Room of Trinity. He will be the College Candidate 
and have all, or nearly all, the residents, including the 
Vice Master, all the tutors and Professor Whewell. 
This may be talked about to-day"; to-morrow do you 
meet the Rocket when it comes in at Fetter Lane, 
when you will receive an account of the meeting 
which ought to appear in the papers of Saturday. This 
I shall depend on your managing. 

"Ever Yours, 

" J. W. Blakesley." 

Brookfield's share in this has been unfortunately lost. 

" Trin : Col : Cam : 

" October 19, '40. 

" My Dear Brookfield, — 

" Many thanks for your efficient service. To-day 
all the machinery has been got into such a state that 
we can start the instant we receive Lyttelton's consent 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 95 

and address which we trust will be to-morrow morning. 
To-morrow John Heath, Neville Grenville, and Hughes 
— all accredited agents — will come up to London by 
the Telegraph and proceed to the British Coffee 
House : you are requested to meet them at the Tele- 
graph as it comes in : and to conduct them to the 
Committee room which early in the morning you will 
have secured at the British Coffee. A small room if no 
other is to be had will do for a beginning. If possible, 
get the Duke of Northumberland's old one : there 
will be a stink of Conservatism in it which will be 
most precious to us : for our great danger is from the 
enemy getting up a Whig and Tory cry. Secure Ven- 
ables and as many Conservatives as you can. Macau- 
lay will be invaluable. All the Whigs we reckon upon 
without fail, but like the guards at Waterloo, although 
they are to win the battle at last, they must not 
show themselves at the beginning. 

" Ever yours, 

"J. W. Blakesley." 

Frederick Denison Maurice, then chaplain at Guy's, 
was not one of the least excited over this business : he 
wrote to John Kemble, who was working the election 
with his usual whole-heartedness — 

" Guy's Hospital, 

"October 24, '40. 
" My Dear Kemble, — 

'' For the last five or six days I have been more 
interested in the Cambridge elections than in almost 
any other matter, though unfortunately I have been 
able to do almost nothing. I wrote very earnestly 
to Hare on Monday and found from his answer that 
he felt as strongly as I did, but he said there were 



96 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

very few Masters of the Senate in his neighbour- 
hood. 

" I have been HbeUing Lord Lyndhurst in a Magazine 
of which I am editor and which circulates some few 
copies among clergy in the country ; but I am 
afraid if my words did carry the least weight, they 
will come too late to be useful. I think it is the 
most important contest that has been carried on for 
years, and one that may do more than almost any 
movement I can think of to frighten knaves and 
encourage honest men. I have said more than once 
that as a clergyman I should much more care to 
keep Lord Lyndhurst out of Cambridge than Hanner 
out of London. 

" Yours very truly, 

''F. Maurice." 

"It was quite clear to me from the multitude of 
Hildyards in Lord Lyndhurst 's first meeting that the 
whole was got up by a mission from the Carlton 
Club. Could not you find some way of making 
people feel the infinite disgrace of such a conge 
d'elire?'' 

But Maurice and all were doomed to disappoint- 
ment — Lord Lyndhurst carried the day by a large 
majority. Charles Merivale, also an " Apostle," gives a 
vivid picture of the election itself. 

" With respect to our late disaster, what is there 
to say, except that like Francis I, we have lost our 
honours, but nothing else. . . . The scene in the 
Senate House baffles all description ! There were 
the young barbarians at play in the gallery, their 
spirits and their ferocity keeping pace with the rising 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 97 

majority, so that it became hardly possible to endure 
the place. Lyttelton stood it through with great 
pluck. He and the Master got hissed in the Ante- 
Chapel the next evening." Immediately the polling 
was over the " practical " minded Blakesley wished 
to see the business part of it transacted and finished 
with. 

'' Trin : Col : 

" November 19, '40. 
" My Dear Brookfield, — 

" You are right in your supposition as to the Globe 
bill. It hung back in the crowd of papers which 
encumber my table and got shut out of the envelope. 
I send it, however, herewith, and at the same time 
another document which came to-day by the post ; 
though how I should ever have acquired such an 
European reputation as to induce Messrs Roake 
and Varty, sensible people, no doubt, to send bills 
contracted in London to me, I cannot understand. 
If they take me for a man who loves paying money 
for its own sake, they are, as the laymen say, devilish 
wrong. By the way, it is very far from impossible 
that Heywood (who I dare say is the author of the 
letter from ' A Dissenter ' which appeared in the 
Chronicle and did its poor part to injure the cause) 
would take it very kind if the Committee would 
consider him responsible for the debts of the contest. 
Pray ascertain this point before more subscriptions 
are collected : and in the meantime countersign 
and send down as much as you can persuade Kemble 
to relinquish. His final conclusion is perfect. 

*' Ever Yours 

" J. W. Blakesley." 
7— (2318) 



98 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

" I rejoice at even the prospect of seeing land in 
the matter of the Bills. They are not, as far as I 
can judge, so large as I feared they would be, although 
the item for the British Coffee House is fearful. I 
was singularly delighted to observe Kemble's counter- 
signature. I suppose he got into the habit of approval 
as Deputy Chamberlain, and permits everything that 
comes in his way." 

Kemble's father was licenser of plays, and there- 
fore in the Lord Chamberlain's office, hence this 
allusion. 

" Trin : Col : 

" November 24, '40. 
" My Dear Brookfield, — 

" Be kind enough to send not less than 700 copies 
of Lord Lyttelton's circular of thanks to us here ; after 
the first sheet the additional expense is only that of 
paper and press work. Be careful to have them 
struck off on paper as thin as will be decent. We 
intend to send them together with a printed list of 
the Poll and Pairs to all Lord Lyt.'s supporters. The 
verbal alterations proceed from his lordship, who, 
pro more suo, never thought for an instant of the 
absurdity produced by the divarication of his 
letter from the advertised ' copy of it.' I only thank 
God he did not re-write it, and trust the age of colla- 
tion went out with Porson, and that the fact of 
the new edition will not be remarked by the verbal 
criticism of the Scholefieldian era. 

*'Very many thanks to you for the trouble you 
have taken in the matter of Flaxman's outlines. 
Pray do not imagine that the matter is a very urgent 
one — that you should fast for me on week-days^ as 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 99 

well as pray for the Bishop of London on Sunday. 
'' Has not Lord John Manners advanced various 
sums ? These kind of accounts ought to be settled 
immediately." 

Lord Lyttelton in speaking of Blakesley's assistance 
to him at this moment said : " He managed all 
for me at Cambridge, for which I hope he will be made 
Archbishop of York." 

Brookfield, fond of walking about London and 
peeping into book shops, had told Blakesley of some 
books he wanted to purchase. These were the Iliad 
and the Odyssey, Mschylus and Dante; but although 
unboundedly pleased to become possessed of this classic 
literature, election bills still distressed him. 

" Caro mio, — 

" I have awaited for some days, with a patience 
worthy of a better cause, the Bill of Mr Fownes, 
which appears between Lord John and you likely to fall 
to the ground. Pray temper your evangelical detest- 
ation of Scribes and Pharisees enough to enable 
3/0U to fulfil the works of the Law to the unhappy 
individual of the former class who has submitted 
his fate to your decision. 

'^ I send back the Drummond list, wishing to know 
the items of the £49 which were contributed by the 
Rev. Mr. Brookfield. Also did the five pound note 
which reached me come from Mr. Meyer Rothschild, 
who is commonly believed to employ such gear in 
curling his locks ? Finding a name without money, 
and money without a name, I felt inclined to put 
them together : but I should prefer some better 

iUOFC. 



100 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

authority for such a step than sound principles of 
conjectural criticism. 

" If the British Coffee House bill cannot be reduced, 
it had better be paid. Nevertheless I hold the Land- 
lord for a rogue — one of those '' beggarly elements " 
which St. Paul holds so cheap ! " 

In this year, early in the days of railways, when 
Brookfield had asked him once to preach for him, 
Blakesley replied : 

'* My Dear Brookfield, — 

" I intend, if sound in wind and limb, to be in 
London both on the 2oth and the 27th of this month, 
on either one of which days I will, if you want me, 
do my best for you and the National Schools. It 
is but fair however to tell you that I contemplate 
performing three railroad journeys before the former, 
and five antecedently to the latter of them : so that 
the proverbial uncertainty of human life is perhaps 
more than usually applicable in this case. I con- 
fess, too, with all due respect for myself, that I 
think you might find many persons who would succeed 
better than myself in extracting silver from the 
breeches-pockets of the Regent Street population. 
I feel quite sure that I should not be humbugged by 
myself, and I suppose one is at least as much influ- 
enced by one's own arguments as anybody else is 
likely to be. However, I will never be so base as to 
retract in leisure a promise made in haste : so believe 
me, 

" Yours to command, 

'^J. W. Blakesley." 

A fortnight later Brookfield writes to Miss Elton — 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY loi 

" In the chapel, which was considerably full, I 
discerned your friends. Oddly enough, Blakesley, 
who helped Ward at Sacrament (wearing therein my 
shoes) dined with Fanny and her friends same evening 
and came in at eleven at night to consume a cigar 
or so with me and told me how he had been hearing 
me bepraised by these ladies. Blakesley is a fine 
fellow in the finest sense of fine." 

During this visit of Blakesley to London he was 
in the habit with other " Apostles "of ** concluding 
the evening in Brookfield's rooms." 

Brookfield writes : ''I returned early to finish a 
sermon — found your letter — why do you use such 
execrable little shabby tea-party envelopes ? Or- 
dered a pewter pint of porter on the strength of 
it and a pipe, had my paper spread before me — wrote 
now and then — sipped, wrote, whiffed, wrote, whiffed, 
sipped, whiffed, sipped, wrote — when in came that same 
Blakesley whom you inquire about and sate till nearly 
twelve, throwing me into the short hours to finish my 
sermon . He laughed violently at my pewter pint, etc . , 
and the spiritualities blended up therewith. He must 
be your man ; he is dark-haired, dark-eyed. Visited 
Trench last year — called with him one day while I 
was at your house. Trench knows no other Blakes- 
ley, nor do I. But he is Cambridge, not oxford. As 
a tutor of Trinity, Blakesley — a capital point for rising 
— is all in a fidget to be married, and will take the first 
favourable opportunity of spurning tutorship with all 
its remote appendices of Deaneries and Bishoprics and 
take him to a domestic life." 



102 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

In writing back Miss Elton said she had told the 
Willises the news of Blakesley which they had required, 
and that he was a " friend of Brookfield/' when they 
all exclaimed '' he was just the person who would be a 
friend of Brookfield's, so very clever and agreeable 
and delightful/ 'and that when they first saw you they 
all said you were '* just a Blakesley sort of man, 
but fancying him oxford, they never inquired whether 
you knew him." 

When Brookfield married, Blakesley sent him the 
following — 

"31 January. 
" Dear Brookfield, — 

" I never read newspapers and therefore often fail 
to learn the great changes which take place from time 
to time in human relations. I, however, learnt from 
the aspiring heir of Hagley (as the newspapers, with 
an alliteration hardly appreciable out of Worcestershire 
or London, called him) that you had incurred that 
responsibility which College fellows sometimes hear of, 
with a sigh or smile, as the case may be. I was in hopes 
of meeting you at the Sterling Club on Tuesday last, 
but I suppose you are as yet confined to a honey diet. 
God help you, I mean bless you ! You have my warmest 
congratulations, which I would deliver in person, 
and crave the honour of an introduction to Mrs. B. 
were it not that business will take me city-wards at 
an hour earlier than that at which decency permits 
a visit. I intend, however, to ask a boon of you, 
namely to leave a copy of a certain discourse which 
I will send to you at the Albany for Lord John Manners, 
together with another for Smyth — his fidus Achates. 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 103 

Garden, too, I will desire to call upon you for one 
that I will also enclose." 

This was probably his pamphlet upon " Where does 
the evil lie ? " 

Blakesley gave up his tutorship in 1845, married 
and settled down in the living of Ware. In 1846, he 
wrote — 

" My Dear Brookfield, 

" At dinner time yesterday here a discussion arose 

which terminated in two bets, my mother-in-law 

taking one side, and my brother-in-law and myself 

the other. We are all very anxious to get our money, 

and as I think you may probably be in London I 

write to you to ask you to ascertain the facts of the 

case ; the phenomenon which caused our dispute 

existing, I believe, in your parish. A beadle has 

occasionally been seen to exercise his authority in 

the Regent's Quadrant, and what we want to know 

is whether this functionary is maintained at the expense 

of the inhabitants for purposes of their own, or 

whether he is a policeman clad in the garb of beadledom 

for the sake of appearances, or whether he is the 

Porter at Swan and Edgar's (which I rather suspect), 

or whether he does not exist except in imagination. 

If he is ens reale, we wish to know whether he is in 

constant pay, or merely retained for field days. Pray 

investigate the subject and let us know : for none of 

us know anybody likely to give information except 

yourself and the Editor of Bell's Life in London. 

" I am rusticating for the present month with wife 
and child in this land of turnips and pheasants — very 
well, except that I am sickening with the cow-pox. 



104 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

My son having been infected with this disease, my 
wife declared she should feel much more comfortable 
if I also were vaccinated, and I was weak enough to 
comply. I daiesay when he begins to cut his teeth 
I shall be obliged to submit to the lancing of my gums, 
and take a few doses of Godfrey's Real Comfort to 
mothers. 

" I hope you have good accounts of Mrs. Brookfield, 
I was compelled to remain a widower for a fortnight, 
and disapprove of the condition. College is the only 
place for celibacy. 

'^Ever yours truly, 

"J. W. Blakesley." 

The above Beadle may have been he, who, when asked 
with regard to some fire that had just taken place " Was 
the watchman sober ? " replied, " For anything I know 
he was ; but all Public characters get drunk some- 
times." 

It was an extraordinary thing that a man of such bril- 
liant attainments as J. W. Blakesley, should have been 
left the best part of his life in retirement ; but it was 
with him as it was with many others at that time — the 
political powers had no sympathy with the spiritual ; 
in fact, there are periods when Governments seem 
afraid to give posts to intellectual men, and the 
middle of the nineteenth century was one of these. 
However, Blakesley was happy in his calm way ; he was 
amongst other things Master of the Mercers' Company ; 
he saw much of his Cambridge friends ; and he wrote 
his charming essays for The Times ; he was that '' Hert- 
fordshire Incumbent " whose shrewd observations 



JOSEPH WILLIAM BLAKESLEY 105 

and pleasant criticisms gave so much pleasure in 
their day ; but his chief work was an edition of 
Herodotus for the Bibliotheca Classica. In 1863 ^^ 
received a canonry of St. Paul's, and in 1872, at the 
age of sixty-four, when his life was almost done, he 
was given by Gladstone the deanery of Lincoln. 
To Brookfield, who wrote to congratulate him on 
this event, he replied : — 

" Dear Brookfield, — 

" Many thanks for your kind congratulations on 
the subject of my appointment. It was entirely 
unsolicited by me, but is not the less welcome. 
Declining years and the increasing difficulty of obtain- 
ing decent curates (in such a place as this) remove 
all doubts which I might otherwise have had about 
exchanging my present for my future preferment. 

I never saw Lincoln till I got the offer of the 
Deanery, and pictured it to myself as a kind of ' Veila ' 
surrounded by marshes and vainly endeavouring by 
the cathedral services to drown the roaring of the 
bulls and croaking of the frogs that inhabited them. 
Since my hurried visit, the week before last, I have 
come to a better mind, and even look with some 
dread on the loftiness of the hill on which I shall 
have to live. About the bulls, indeed, I am not 
sure that I was so very far wrong. The quantity of 
cattle trucks, mostly filled, which met my eye at the 
different stations, filled me with amazement, and I 
find that the manufactures at Lincoln are almost exclu- 
sively engaged in the production of agricultural instru- 
ments. It is rather hard to be exposed to the dan- 
gers of being choked by smoke and gored by oxen 
in the same place : and Mrs. Blakesley has a particular 



io6 THE CAMBRIDGE " APOSTLES " 

dread of horned cattle, which makes me keep Suffolk 
cows in consequence of it. And as to your kind thought 
of an admonition to ' go up higher ' — a more-than- 
sexagenarian, who has just mounted from the rail 
way station to the deanery, might be tempted to 
reply in extremely improper phraseology to any such 
suggestion. Pray make our best remembrances to 
Mrs BRookfield and believe me, 

"Very truly yours, 

'^ J. W. Blakesley." 

" I observe you date from the ' Rolls House,' and 
as I learn from Jerome that this is what is commonly 
called Bethlehem, I entrust this letter to a friend who 
is going to Palestine to post at Joppa." 

A man of crystal clearness of intellect, high prin- 
ciples — amiable and straightforward — well might 
Tennyson say that before him — 

Low-cowering shall the Sophist sit ; 

Falsehood shall bare her plaited brow ; 

Fair-fronted Truth shall droop not now 
With shrilling shafts of subtle wit. 
Nor mart5n:-fiames, nor trenchant swords 

Can do away that ancient lie ; 

A gentler death shall Falsehood die, 
Shot thro' with cunning words. 



CHAPTER VI 

CHARLES BULLER 

Farewell ! fine humourist, finer reasoner still, 
Lively as Luttrell, logical as Mill, 
Lamented Buller — just as each new hour 
Knit thy stray forces into steadfast power, 
Death shut thy progress from admiring eyes. 
And gave thy soul's completion to the skies. 

(BuLWEP. Lytton.) 

The '' Apostles " of the first five years of the 
" Society's " existence, possessed minds of a totally 
different calibre to those of the following lustre. 
They were deeper, heavier and possibly a little 
narrower. Charles Buller, although by date of mem- 
bership belonging to the serious earlier' period, by 
temperament appertained to the later and lighter era. 
It was not the wont of the early Apostles to choose 
their associates on account of any mirthfulness of 
disposition ; and Charles Buller, a worthy aspirant 
for '* Apostolic " honours, was approved of by them 
solely on account of his logical mind and in spite of 
his lively qualities. That lightness of spirit was 
discouraged by the ''Society" is shown on several 
occasions, notably when some of the sterner souls 



io8 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

marked their disapprobation of Monckton Milnes' 
gaiety. If BuUer^once an '' Apostle/' shocked some of 
the more grave, he attracted, dehghted, and endeared 
himself to those gifted with a sense of humour. Gay, 
amiable, endowed with the sense of proportion which 
characterizes bright natures such as his, and equipped 
with the gift of raillery, he, with such kindred spirits 
as Milnes, Merivale, Blakesley, and Kemble, were an 
invaluable element in the '' Society." For they con- 
trived to " smile away " a tendency which was grow- 
ing among their abnormally gifted fellows to attach 
too much weight to their own opinions, which threat- 
ened to develop into that most un-Cantabrigian of 
qualities which is nowadays called " priggishness." 

His liveliness was inherited from his mother, a beau- 
tiful person, sparkling, and partly Irish," an ingenu- 
ously intelligent woman of the gossamer type " — 
a lady who, when her son was returned to Parliament, 
asked " What could be recommended for a young 
man who wished to acquire parliamentary confidence ? 
Was artificial excitement advisable for a very nervous 
man ? . . . So-and-so, she understood, took opium." 
At Harrow, where liveliness was not considered a 
" first principle," the son of this brilliant lady was 
scarcely appreciated. Full of " airy ingenuity " and 
having the keenest sense for everything "from the 
sublime to the ridiculous " his spirits soared higher 
perhaps than youthful spirits had ever soared before, 
and the height of their flight may be the reason that 
he was never found walking in beaten tracks. How- 




Charles Buller 

From a painting by B. E. Duppa, Esq. 



CHARLES BULLER 109 

ever, before he left that school he managed to show 
that he had valuable gifts. His aptitude for study 
was extraordinary — and though the sense of appli- 
cation in those early days was missing — he yet gave 
many proofs of a quick and intelligent mind. It 
was at Harrow that he first made friends with John 
Sterling. 

A " handful" at home and too young for college 
the question of the disposal of this gay genius became 
a difficult one ; but just as his parents were in despair, 
a visit to Edinburgh brought about an introduction 
to Carlyle. Carlyle was told beforehand that the 
lad was '' clever but too mercurial and unmanageable "; 
but this he waived and resolved to take him., and in a 
happy hour Charles Buller became the sage's happy 
pupil. By some strange attraction, the volatile 
youth and the staid philosopher took to each other, 
and became fast friends. But it is a fact that the gay, 
the frank-minded and genial-spirited seem always to 
have got on well with Carlyle, to have liked him and 
been liked by him and accepted at their true value. He 
had apparently a more gracious manner for these than 
for those with natures more like to his own — the rough 
and taciturn. " From the first," he says, '' I found my 
Charles Buller a most manageable, intelligent, cheery, 
and altogether welcome and intelligible phenomenon ; 
quite a bit of sunshine in my dreary Edinburgh element ; 
I was in waiting for his brother and him when they 
landed. We instantly set out on a walk, round by the 
foot of Salisbury Crags, up from Holyrood, by the 



no THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Castle, and Law Courts, home again to George Square ; 
and really I recollect few more pleasant walks in 
all my life ! So all-intelligent, seizing everything 
said to him with such a recognition, so loyal-hearted, 
chivalrous, guileless, so delighted (evidently) with 
me, as I was with him. Charles, by his qualities, his 
ingenious curiosities, his brilliancy of faculty and 
character, was actually an entertainment to me rather 
than a labour." As time went on Carlyle waxed more 
and more enthusiastic over the promising youth, and 
vowed he far surpassed himself in Latin and Greek. " I 
tried to guide him into reading," he said, ^'into solid 
inquiry and reflection. He got some mathematics 
from me and might have had more. He got, in brief, 
what expansion into such wider fields of intellect and 
more manful modes of thinking and working as my 
poor possibilities could lead him ; and was always 
generously grateful to me afterwards." 

When Buller finally parted with Carlyle as a tutor, 
he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was in 
1826. It was Sterling who made him an '^Apostle" 
and introduced him to intellectual society there. His 
essays were considered to be brilliant, his criticisms 
still more so, but it was as a conversationalist that 
he was most highly esteemed — even though " a mas- 
tery of banter sometimes led him to the verge of 
levity." Having, however, some gravity beneath his 
lightness, he went perforce with Trench, Kemble, 
Sterling and others through their Niebiihric-Ben- 
thamic period ; a period when they talked themselves 



CHARLES BULLER iii 

to " exhaustion " — some of them mentally as well as 
physically. In later days, BuUer was able to smile 
back on this period and say cheerfully, " He had 
grown out of being a Utilitarian. Benthamites had 
very good hearts but wanted intellects." 

He took his degree in 1828, and immediately put 
up for Parliament. The shortness of his residence at 
the University rather cut him off from the " Apostolic " 
set to which he belonged by right and placed him out 
of the Poetic Band of 1828-32 ; but considering his 
many and different interests he kept up his associa- 
tion with the Society fairly well. His career was 
followed with the sincerest interest by those he left 
behind him at Cambridge, and Blakesley soon 
wrote : " The two Bullers are canvassing Liskeard 
in Cornwall for Charles ; but the electors are so 
delighted with both that they do not know how to 
divide them and are quite disgusted with the Reform 
Bill for only leaving them one Member." 

He was returned for Liskeard, a seat he kept ever 
after, and Kemble, who had always the fondest belief 
in the genius of his fellows, says : ** Charles Buller is 
in Parliament. He made a maiden speech the other 
night, which was evidently very comic, though infam- 
ously reported in the papers. You will see him make 
a figure one of these days." Another " Apostle " 
thought Buller had in no way done himself justice in 
the House, and another, noting there was a " morne 
silence " after his first outburst, opined — " I suppose 
Buller dare not speak ; his RadicaHsm and his family 



112 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

interests are so fearfully at wax with each other." 
The special questions with which his political 
career is most intimately connected are the housing of 
the Public Records ; the Canadian Mission of 1837-38 ; 
and the question of Pauperism ; all of which he dealt 
with with wonderful ability and clearness of vision. 
When the Houses of Parliament were burnt in 1834 
a quantity of the Records, formerly housed in West- 
minster Hall, narrowly escaped destruction. Sir Henry 
Cole (who practically founded the South Kensington 
Museum, and who was afterwards Assistant Keeper of 
the Records) presently agitated with great energy for a 
new and safer system for the safe keeping of these pre- 
cious, documents but no attention was paid to his com- 
plaints. He appealed to Lord Brougham, who replied 
■ that " he should be heard in time if he would only 
keep quiet." Sir Henry would not keep quiet, but 
went to Charles BuUer, who, being a man of culture 
and intelligence, sympathized with him and his cause, 
and at once took the question to the House. There 
he moved that an inquiry should be held to investigate 
the conduct of the Commissioners of the Public Records, 
and " so great was his wit and delicacy in enlivening 
this dry subject that the House was enchanted." 
Lord John Russell, then leader of the House, said it 
was greatly indebted to Mr. Buller for bringing the 
matter before them, and a portion of Buller' s speech 
on this subject runs — 

** The public records, it was quite unnecessary 



CHARLES BULLER 113 

for him to remind the House, were, whether they 
respected private property, or the means of au- 
thentic history, of extreme value. The Commission 
had sat now many years, and was estabhshed in 
consequence of an address from the House of Com- 
mons in the year 1800. The annual grants to the 
Commissioners had varied from £5,000 to £20,000. 
Small as the annual amount was, yet the House 
would certainly think it a matter worthy of being 
inquired into, when they found that since the forma- 
tion of the Commission about £400,000 had been voted 
by Parliament towards its expenditure. 

" Besides this enormous expenditure, it now appeared 
that this Commission was actually in debt to the amount 
of £20,000. A portion of the public money entrusted 
to the Commissioners, had been devoted to publishing 
in the various languages of Europe, an account of 
the Commission, and a full detail of the names and 
titles of the Commissioners. He held in his hand 
a Portuguese pamphlet on the subject, in which the 
names of the Commissioners were given, no doubt in 
the purest Portuguese. The honourable member for 
Montgomery (Mr. C.Wynn) was designated 'O muito 
nobre Carlos Watkins Williams Wynn.' The honour- 
able baronet, the member for Oxford, had a most 
romantic title, * Sir Roberto Harry Inglis.' That was 
one of the ways in which the public money was spent — 
making the style and title of the Commissioners 
known all over Europe, from Lisbon to Hamburgh. 
Even the Secretary to the Commission is immortalized 
in the printed proceedings of the Board as ' Viro 
illustrio, excellentissimo, clarissimo, doctissimo C.P. 
Coopero equiti Anglo ' . . . 

''The principal objects of the Commission were the 
care of the records, their preservation, and perpetua- 

8— (2318) 



114 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

tion, by means of transcription of such as had become 
neariy defaced by time or accident. It appeared 
by the last parhamentary returns of the Commis- 
sioners' expenditure that only ;fi,5oo had been 
spent on what he would call the most important 
object for which they were appointed, namely, 
on the arrangement of the records. What was the 
present state of those important documents ? Con- 
sidering that the object of the Commission was the 
preservation of the records and the affording easy 
accessibility to them, the method in which the 
records were kept was perfectly scandalous. They 
were scattered about in eight or ten different offices, 
in different parts of the town. Those at Somerset 
House were in underground vaults, where the light 
of the sun never penetrated. Fires were lighted in 
these vaults for the purpose of dispelling the damp, 
and the result was that the records were alternately 
damp and dry, the destructive effects of which changes 
he need hardly point out ; he feared they might have 
operated extensively already. A very picturesque 
description had been given in a report of some stal- 
actite found in one of these vaults by the honourable 
baronet (Sir R. Inglis) ; stalactites were interesting 
objects to the geologist, but he (Mr. C. Buller) thought a 
Record office an inappropriate place for their growth. 
Mr. lUingworth, who was very familiar with these 
records and their situation, stated in a letter that he was 
afraid to touch them on account of their dampness, 
lest he should catch the rheumatism in his hand. In 
these same vaults the records were placed so high on 
shelves, some sticking out like bottles, that a ladder 
must be obtained to reach them ; and then there was the 
chance of falling from the top with the roll upon the 
adventurous individual who made the experiment : no 



CHARLES BULLER 115 

very pleasant predicament. Surely nothing could be 
more evident than that the public records of a nation 
ought not to be left in such circumstances ; but should be 
placed in commodious and suitable apartments, in 
accessible situations, and under a perfect system of 
arrangement. As to the miscellaneous records lately 
at the Mews, and now at Carlton-ride, the method of 
keeping them was most ridiculous. They did not 
talk there of books, and manuscripts, and rolls, like 
other people, but they described the records by sacks 
and bushels. They would tell you that they had six 
hundred and fifty sacks of records, containing eight 
bushels apiece. The Commission had begun some little 
good here ; which being good^ was mysteriously 
suspended. The papers were sorted by years in sacks, 
so that if you wanted a document for such a year 
you went to such a sack, etc." 

This was his first important speech and in it he 
" hit the house between wind and water,' ' and he became 
from that moment a favourite debater, " none so well 
as he could range from grave to gay," and all sides 
delighted to hear him. He had gained the ear of the 
House and he never afterwards lost it. Whatever the 
subject he took up, he gave to it all his time and all his 
powers. When he seconded Monckton Milnes against 
Lord Strong in New Zealand, somebody said: '' The 
case was so good in itself that it hardly required the 
great abihty that Buller showed." The Bill for the 
better housing of the Public Records was passed in 
1838, and all England, and students everywhere, have 
reason to thank Charles Buller for his signal services 
and to be grateful for the triumph he then achieved. 



ii6 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

His patience, ability, and capacity for hard work 
led to his being chosen by Lord Durham to go with him 
as private secretary on his mission to Canada. Buller's 
Report upon that business — for that it was he who 
wrote it was a secret de Polichinelle— though written 
when he himself was saddened by the result, (Brook- 
field, who was staying in the same house with him 
soon after his return to England says " Buller is 
much chastened by Canada ") is considered to be for 
exactness, delicacy, and diplomacy combined " one 
of the ablest and most effective papers of the age." 
This document seemed to have removed some 
of the grave difficulties which then existed between 
England and Canada, and to have led to colonial 
administration and self-government, privileges which 
were afterwards extended to other colonies. It was 
also the foundation, as well as a goodly part of the 
structure, of Harriet Martineau's Thirty Years' Peace. 

Buller was a clever barrister — a Q.C. who con- 
ducted cases before the Privy Council — as well as a 
Parliamentarian ; and his legal knowledge combined 
with his tender heart led him to take up with enthu- 
siasm the question of the improvement of the condi- 
tion of the poor. He saw how terrible and immense 
was the subject and he did not shrink from grappling 
with it. He brought his own peculiar talents to bear 
upon his task, and treated the situation with such 
firmness and perspicuity that his knowledge of the sub- 
ject becoming by application as well as by interest 
a special one, he was made chief administrator of the 



CHARLES BULLER 117 

Poor Law. He was one of the first to advocate 
emigration as a means of lightening the weight of 
pauperism and by this boldness brought a storm upon 
himself. But he had on his side those who knew the 
poor face to face and who were heart and soul interested 
in their welfare. F. D. Maurice was one of these and 
one of the first to encourage and aid him in his wide 
spreading schemes of practical philanthropy. In the 
House, BuUer was remarkable for his reserved and 
courtly demeanour, even in those days when it was usual 
for members to display good manners. A refined sense 
of humour such as his carried with it a sense of 
fitness ; Monckton Milnes, a kindred gay spirit, was 
also used to assume a special parliamentary manner, 
in the deference then deemed due to the dignity of the 
Speaker's chair. 

The sweet ease of the friendship between these two 
extraordinary men may be gathered from the intimacy 
of a remark which Buller once made when Milnes had 
accomplished something still more fantastic than his 
usual fantasies — " I often think, Milnes, how puzzled 
your Maker must be to account for your con- 
duct." 

It was Buller who first introduced Milnes to Carlyle, 
thereby providing the gloomy philosopher with a 
substitute for himself when he should be gone. Many 
a '' gorgeous " hour the two spent together with the 
cynic, who would say of his former pupil : " Charles 
Buller, you are the most genial rascal I ever met." But 
Buller was one of Carlyle's enthusiasms : he delighted 



ii8 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

in him and trusted him ; he never had quite the same 
easy confidence in Milnes. 

Side by side, Buller and Milnes together for 
many years dazzled and surprised society with their 
glittering qualities ; but when Buller, at Lord Mel- 
bourne's, said^ that he was jealous of Milnes and 
feared he would only be known to posterity as his 
contemporary, it was an arranged speech and he 
probably winked at Milnes as he said the words. Their 
great play was to cap each other's jests ; by prearrange- 
ment they would roughly expose each other's supposed 
foibles, and leave their companions to wonder how 
one could put up with the other ; a form of joke which 
to-day would not be tolerated. It suited them too 
to be considered rival wits — for this enabled them 
to play off any plot they had conceived — for their 
own amusement — against any of the company they 
were in ; it also gave plausibility to any amazing 
additions they might choose to invent — -for the amuse- 
ment of their friends — to any startling current scandal. 

Their great, and now historic jest, was, of course, 
that played upon the occasion of the Queen's Fancy 
Ball in 1842. Meant for a political squib it turned 
out to be the most successful hoax of modern times. 
The originator was Buller, Milnes was his cheerful 
assistant. One morning it was gravely reported that 
in the French Chamber one of the Ministers had asked 
" If the French Ambassador in London had been invited 
to the Bal Masque given for the purpose of awakening 
the long buried griefs of France in the disasters of 



CHARLES BULLER 119 

Crecy, Poictiers and the loss of Calais ? " The Press 
was the most deceived by this, but the world in gen- 
eral was taken in ; the subject was discussed gravely 
in the Clubs, and all over the country crept the idea 
that war might ensue. Sir Robert Peel was told, 
" There's the devil to pay in France about this foolish 
Ball." But the genius who invented the joke had 
reckoned upon this, had been first in the field, and earher 
— had taken Sir Robert into his confidence ! It was 
not easy to clear up a hoax of this nature — the deceived 
public became so suspicious that they would not believe 
the truth when it was revealed to them, so that the jest 
had a long life. Buller even added to it a letter written 
in Latin which was so humorous as to be compared 
with the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum — though in 
the end this in some degree helped to quiet things 
down. This joyous gentleman could be anything but 
ill-natured or dull ; he was classed by Milnes as a popular 
intelligence. Greville was about the only person who 
did not entirely appreciate him, and he said — ''he 
knew Buller was amusing, but he was too much of a 
banterer for him ! " 

For many reasons Buller did not keep up so much 
with the " Apostles " as others did ; but he often at- 
tended the yearly dinner. Like most of his " brethren" 
he had a large share of anecdote ; these indeed, they all 
seemed to collect ; not only for their own amuse- 
ment, but in order to pass them on to others and out 
into the world. His friendship was extended to all 
whom he knew with any degree of intimacy. Between 



120 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

himself and Harriet, Lady Ashburton, there existed, 
from the time he met her at the sick couch of his brother 
in Madeira, a charming attachment ; the brightness of 
each other's intellectual gifts drew them together, 
and a similar sympathy with all philanthropic schemes 
kept them friends. The times at the Grange when 
he was '' Master of the Revels " were indeed pleasant 
ones, though not perhaps on the same intellectual 
scale as during the period that immediately followed. 

Thackeray was another of Buller's friends; from 
the time they met at Cambridge they kept up a warm 
though desultory friendship, but when the great 
author came to live in London, there was opportunity 
for closer and more frequent intercourse, which both 
eagerly seized upon and appreciated. 

There was a physical resemblance between the 
two which was often a subject of banter. Buller, 
like Thackeray, had had his nose broken in a school 
encounter, and both were exceptionally tall — Buller 
stood six feet three and was commonly said to be a 
yard in width. 

When Buller died, Thackeray, who never after- 
wards spoke of him but with a sigh, introduced 
Brookfield to Lady Ashburton — to, in some sort, 
help to fill up the great gap made in the Grange 
circle. Buller was still fighting the pauper question 
when his almost sudden death in 1848, came as 
a shock to London and to all who knew him. 
When he had been made Judge Advocate some time 
before, he had refused the Privy Councillorship, which 



CHARLES BULLER I2i 

that post carried with it ; and though he subsequently 
relented and accepted it, he had not been sworn in 
when he died. Only a fortnight before the end he 
was the gayest of a gay party at the Grange. Thack- 
eray, much affected by the news, sent a special messen- 
ger on the night of his death with his fine letter of grief 
to the Brookfields ; and he wrote as well his well- 
known lines in " Dr. Birch." 

Who knows the inscrutable design ? 
Blessed be He who took and gave. 
Why should your mother, Charles, not mine 
Be weeping at her darling's grave ? 
We bow to Heaven that willed it so, 
That darkly rules the fate of all. 
That sends the respite or the blow, 
That's free to give or to recall. 

While Milnes, the companion of his lighter hours, 
wrote to a friend : '' You will hear by this mail of 
Buller's death. It is an irreparable loss to me, for he 
was the single public man with whom I always sym- 
pathized, and who seemed to understand me — at 
least as well as I did myself." He also wrote his noble 
Epitaph in which occurs : " His character was dis- 
tinguished by sincerity and resolution, his mind by 
vivacity and clearness of comprehension ; while the 
vigour of expression and the singular wit that made 
him eminent in debate, and delightful in society were 
tempered by a most gentle and generous disposition, 
earnest in friendship and benevolent to all." 

Macaulay, too, paid him his tribute. When he was re- 
elected for Edinburgh, he, in a speech, referred to 



122 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

some of the eminent men who had vanished during 
his absence from the House of Commons. " In 
ParUament I shall look in vain for virtues which I 
loved, for abilities which I admired. ... I shall 
remember with regret how much eloquence and art, 
how much acuteness and knowledge, how many- 
engaging qualities, how many fair hopes are buried in 
the grave of Charles BuUer." 

Carlyle's grief was touching. Buller had been part 
of his life for a quarter of a century. He said of 
him : ** There shone mildly in his conduct a beautiful 
veracity, as it were unconscious of itself ; a perfect 
spontaneous absence of all cant, hypocrisy, and hollow 
pretence. . . . Very gentle too, though full of fire ; 
simple, brave and graceful. What he did and what 
he said came from him as light from a luminous body, 
and had thus always in it a high and rare merit, 
which any of the more discerning could appreciate 
fully." 

It was not his early death, in the midst of fame and 
power, which created romantic interest around this 
brilliant man ; his sterling worth throughout his life 
excited genuine admiration ; and it was genuine 
affection which brought about that extraordinary 
burst of praise and sorrow at his demise. 

His bust, a very good one, is in the west aisle of 
Westminster Abbey ; not far from him is the fine head 
of Connop Thirlwall, and there is Trench quite close 
and Tennyson's body also near ; and, as in their lives, 
so in their deaths are these " Apostles " associated. 



CHAPTER VII 

ARTHUR H. HALL AM 

' My Arthur ! whom I shall not see 
Till all my widow' d race be run ; 
Dear as the Mother to the son. 
More than my brothers are to me. 

I leave thy praises unexpressed 
In verse that brings myself relief ; 
And by the measure of my grief 

I leave thy greatness to be guessed.^' 

(Tennyson) 

The life of this brilliant young genius ''the Ufa 
and grace of the set "was one of remarkable complete- 
ness. Favoured in his birth, in his gifts, in his death 
and in the great memorial written thereon — he remains, 
and will ever remain, a singularly dehcate and at- 
tractive personality. 

His childhood was not like that of others. The 
scope and capacity of his mind was so prodigious and 
so early evident that his parents — themselves of the 
highest culture — were startled by it and when they 
realized how prodigally he was endowed became almost 
afraid to contemplate or speak of his gifts. 

At nine years of age he was writing dramatic poetry, 

123 



124 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

at fourteen translating Dante's Ugolino into Greek 
Iambics — and such was the hold of this great poet 
upon him that his latest work was the rendering of 
his Vita Nuova into English — while all his youthful 
hours were employed in learning foreign tongues. 
At Eton he '' stood supreme amongst his fellows." 
It is not surprising, perhaps, that two such mighty 
though widely different natures as his and Gladstone's 
should there have made a deep mutual impression. 
Hallam took this schoolmate to his heart and under 
his protection ; and the strong personality of the 
future statesman submitted meekly to\he domination 
of his friend's overpowering charm. 

/it is curious, after all that has passed, to picture 
these young giants on an occasion when the youthful 
Gladstone was engaged at the study fire preparing a 
savoury meal for their common delectation, and Hallam 
was engaged in composing a sonnet to the school- 
boy cook, addressed to " My Bosom Friend." (These 
lines he subsequently polished and published). 

When he joined the Eton Debating Society he 
for once and for ever asserted his strength. The 
youth of his day approved of Catholic Emancipation, 
and most Etonians spoke well upon that subject; but 
Hallam delivered his convictions in favour of the Bill 
with logical reason as well as with poetic fervour. 
His companions perceived his ability and rejoiced in 
it and — unlike schoolboys as a rule — recognized they 
had a genius in their midst ; while he himself " had 
no high, ungenial or exclusive ways, but heartily 




Arthur II. Hallam 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 125 

acknowledged and habitually conformed to the repub- 
lican equality long and happily established in the life 
of our English public schools." ^ 

When at the age of sixteen he left Eton^ he, for 
the months that had to elapse between school and 
Cambridge, travelled in Italy with his parents. Of 
this step Gladstone was of opinion that, while doubt- 
less good for the youth, it was undoubtedly bad for 
the student. During his eight months residence in 
that country, however, Hallam returned to his alle- 
giance to Dante — whose place in his fancy Byron had 
f or[a month or two usurped^and entranced by the scho- 
lastic theology and mystic visions of the Paradiso, he, 
through loving study of that great epic, gained such an 
intimate knowledge of the Italian language that he was 
able to write sonnets in it ; which sonnets were after- 
wards pronounced by Italian scholars to be perfect 
both in form and expression. Having an ''ardent and 
adventurous mind " he was not entirely absorbed by 
poetry during this period ; painting and sculpture as 
well took strong hold of him, while *' his progress in 
all he undertook, as well as in his nature, was then, as 
always, great and rapid." ) 

Afterwards, he came round himself to the Gladstonian 
opinion — for he wrote : " These travels and new 
experiences should rather have come after my three 
years of College than before, but nothing can cancel it 
now, and I must go on in the path that has been 
chalked out for me." 

He was seventeen when he went to Trinity College, 



V 



126 THE CAMBRIDGE '' APOSTLES " 

Cambridge. There Blakesley, Thompson, Thirlwall, 
Tennyson and Spedding were all at once captivated 
by him. , They saw his charm and felt his strength, 
and " bowed before him in conscious inferiority in 
everything." There was a personal as well as a 
mental attraction about this extraordinary youth 
which contributed to his singular power of fascination 
Going '' up " as he did, with a reputation such as that 
already attained, much was expected of him, but 
he seems to have had no decided ambitions and, his in- 
terests being somewhat widely spread, he could not 
give himself calmly to classics and by-and-by re- 
solved to abstain from all competition. 

But the renunciation of an academical career caused 
him some depression, and for a time " hipped " him 
somewhat against Cambridge. When this fit was upon 
him he wrote to Gladstone : '' Academical honours 
would be less than nothing to me were it not for my 
father's wishes, and even these are moderate on the 
subject. If it please God that I make the name I bear 
honoured in a second generation, it will be by inward 
power which is its own reward." 

Gladstone implies that Henry Hallam ought by right 
to have sent his son to Oxford — he says such a deter- 
mination on the father's part would have been *' pro- 
pitious to the mind of Arthur Hallam," and he regards 
it as certain that if he had been at Oxford he would 
" by taking the highest classical honours, and by a 
thoroughly congenial development of philosophical 
power, have illustrated the annals of the University." 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 127 

There is no doubt that Hallam's wonderful faculties 
did not find their proper scope at Cambridge. Though 
there was no intellectual work of which he was not 
capable, he devoted most of his time to the culture of 
poetry and to the study of metaphysics. He never, it 
^seems, avoided a metaphysical discussion, his subtlety 
in this branch of philosophy being considered greater 
than that of any of his contemporaries. Cousin, who 
knew him, said of him : " It is a fit thing that the son of 
a great historian should be a great metaphysician." 
That his knowledge had wide scope is shown by Milnes, 
who said : *' I have a very deep respect for Hallam. 
He really seems to know everything from meta- 
physics to cookery. I dine with him, Thirlwall and 
Hare (think what a parti carre we shall be) on 
Wednesday." 
(Hallam was in nature gay and sociable, and he was 
generally to be found in a friend's room, reading 
or conversing. When the mood was on him he 
would go from one to the other of them, and for 
choice to where he was most likely to find those 
with comprehensions as quick as his own. He was 
helpful and tactful in conversation, and invariably 
assumed that his hearers were as intelligent and as 
brilliant as himself. Occasionally he would get 
fits of dissatisfaction with these irregulated meander- 
ings, and in such frames of mind he would make new 
plans for the better management of his day and fresh 
schemes for his work. But even in his most desultory 
moods he worked at something, every moment being 



128 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

given to the absorption or to the giving forth of know- 
ledge. 

( His taste lay principally in philosophic poetry ; he 
showed early that this for him was the '' natural and 
necessary language of general emotion." Fletcher 
and Shakespeare he knew almost by heart, Wordsworth 
and Shelley became his passion, while he had the 
highest opinion of Coleridge. During one vacation he 
and Merivale went together to call upon that poet at 
his house at Hampstead. When they got there they 
" found him deep in metaphysics, but on Hallam 
pressing him very hard he shut up and said, ' You will 
find it all there in my work on logic,' pointing to a big 
folio in vellum which occupied a conspicuous place on 
his shelves. ' When Coleridge died,' adds Merivale 
(who tells the tale), ' this book was opened and its 
interior found to be blank.' " Hallam, in his Tim- 
budoo, said of the impressions Coleridge left on him 
by the few conversations " which it was his delight " 
to have had with him — 

Methought I saw a face whose every line 

Wore the pale cast of thought : a good old man, 

Most eloquent, who spake of things divine. 

Hallam was prime mover of the Embassy which the 
Cambridge Union sent to its Oxford sister club in the 
year 1829 j when he, Sunderland and Milnes went 
forth to discuss with Oxford the relative merits of 
Shelley and Byron. Milnes' account of this historic 
event at the time, is graphic — 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 129 

" Sunderland spoke for it, then Hallam, then some 
Oxonians — and I succeeded. The contrast from our 
long, noisy, shuffling, scraping, talking, vulgar, ridicu- 
lous-looking kind of assembly, to a neat little square 
room with eighty or ninety young gentlemen sprucely 
dressed, was enough to unnerve a more confident per- 
son than myself. Sunderland was somewhat aw^d, 
and became tautological, and spoke what we should 
call an inferior speech, but which dazzled his hearers. 
Hallam, as being among old friends, was bold and 
spoke well. I was certainly nervous, but, I think, 
pleased my audience better than I pleased myself. 
The Oxonian speaking is wretched." 

And his remembrance of it in 1866 is still more in- 
teresting — 

" It was in company with Mr. Sunderland and 
Arthur Hallam that I formed part of a deputation sent 
from the Union of Cambridge to the Union of Oxford ; 
and what do you think we went about ? Why, we 
went to assert the right of Mr. Shelley to be considered 
a greater poet than Lord Byron. At that time we at 
Cambridge were all very full of Mr. Shelley, and a 
friend of ours suggested that as Shelley had been ex- 
pelled from Oxford, and greatly ill-treated, it would be 
a very grand thing for us to go to Oxford and raise a 
debate upon his character and powers. So, with full 
permission of the authorities, we went to Oxford — in 
those days a long chaise journey of ten hours — and we 
were hospitably entertained by a young student by 
the name of Gladstone — who, by the way, has himself 
since been expelled. We had an interesting debate, 
one of the principal speakers in which, who reminded 
me of the circumstance, is now an Archbishop of the 
Roman Catholic Church ; but we were very much 

9— (2318) 



130 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

shocked^ and our vanity was not a little wounded, to 
find that nobody at Oxford knew anything about Mr. 
Shelley." 

Blakesley also said of this event — 

" There was proposed at their Union the question as 
to the respective moral tendency of the writings of 
Shelley and Byron. Sunderland, Milnes and Hallam 
made an expedition to Oxford and spoke there in 
favour of the former, thereby of course procuring to 
themselves the reputation of atheists. Howbeit, they 
gained some converts and spread the knowledge of the 
poet." 

The result of this great meeting was noted and 
placed in the records of the Cambridge Union 
Society as follows — 

" Mr. Wilberforce (Oriel), President of the Oxford 
Union, and Mr. Doyle (Christ Church) moved that 
' Shelley was a greater poet than Lord Byron.' He was 
supported by Mr. T. Sunderland, Mr. Arthur Hallam 
and Mr. Monckton Milnes, of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, and Mr. Oldham (Oriel) ; and opposed by Mr. 
Manning, of Balliol. The Division was — Ayes, 33 ; 
Noes, 90 ; Majority in favour of Lord Byron, 57." 

Cambridge men ever afterwards maintained that it 
was not until this episode that Oxford men had even 
heard the name of Shelley. 

In the year 1830 Hallam, together with Tennyson 
and Milnes, were all made '' Apostles," when these 
three bright spirits together began to use, at the meet- 
ings of the Society, '* all licence of raillery and criti- 
cism." Hallam's Eton debates and his " Union " ex- 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 131 

periences stood him in good stead. " Hallam spoke 
very well." '' Hallam has been enlightening the 'wise 
and few'." " Hallam's marvellous mind has been 
gleaning in wisdom from every tract of knowledge." 

He read his Theodiccea Novissima before the " Wise 
Society," and " would read or discuss metaphysics as 
he lay on a sofa, surrounded by a noisy party, with as 
much care and acuteness as if he had been alone. 
He was fond of society ; that is to say, the society he 
was in. " A set of literary men, remarkable for free 
and friendly intercourse, whose characters, talents and 
opinions of every complexion were brought into con- 
tinual collision, all licence of discussion permitted and 
no offence taken," said Spedding, this set being, of 
course, the " Apostles." 

It was considered that whatever the '^ Apostolic " 
topic might be, Hallam was the one who could throw 
the newest light upon it and even show to its closest 
student points he had never yet suspected. 

And last, the master-bowman, he 
Would cleave the mark. A willing ear 
;. We lent him. Who, but hung to hear 

The rapt oration flowing free. 

From point to point, with power and grace 
And music in the bounds of law. 
To these conclusions which we saw 
The God within him light his face. 

And seem to lift the form, and glow 
In azure orbits heavenly-wise ; 
And over those ethereal eyes 
The bar of Michael Angelo. 

The year which saw these illustrious additions to the 



132 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

band of the " Apostles " was the year after Timbudoo^ 
and the year of the expedition to Spain. In this latter 
business, in which Hallam, as well as many of the 
" brethren," was interested, he, " ardent in the cause 
of those he deemed to be oppressed," according to his 
father, '' was led to give a proof of his generosity with 
more of energy and enthusiasm than discretion." 

'■ When he set out to take assistance to the Spaniards, 
he went as all these young conspirators did, secretly. He 
met Tennyson by appointment, and with him got as far 
as the Pyrenees. They[had a meeting with some of the 
heads of the conspiracy, and gave over the money and 
messages they had brought for Torrijos' allies, and to 
the alarm of their people, were not heard of for several 
weeks. Hallam himself, far from sanguine at this 
time, was apprehensive as to the result ; but he says 
in a letter, "Alfred was only troubled to think he 
could not keep in his mind the vivid impressions 
he got of people, scenery and atmosphere." All at home 
, being anxious about them, the affair in which they 
were involved hanging fire, and every circumstance 
connected with it opposed to a satisfactory issue, they 
rather ruefully came back. But they took Cauteretz 
on their homeward way, concerning which journey 
Tennyson wrote so feelingly so many years afterwards. 
In writing a comforting letter to Trench at Gib- 
raltar, about the failure of the conspirators' greatest 
coup, Hallam said : "I had hoped and believed till 
the very last for the success of the noble cause for 
which you are struggling, but in spite of Kemble's 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 133 

sanguine letters, I can hope and believe no longer. 
The game is lost in Spain." He, however, did not 
find his romantic adventure favourably regarded by 
his father. The young man complained, '' he does 
not understand, that after helping to revolutionize 
a kingdom, one is little inclined to trouble about 
scholarships or ' such gear.' " 

He had competed for the prize poem which Tennyson 
carried off with his " Timbuctoo." It would be 
interesting to know if the Examiners had the 
remotest idea of the responsibility imposed upon 
them as they compared the work of such poets as 
Hallam, Milnes and Tennyson. Nothing, however, 
exceeded the joy of his companions over Tenny- 
son's success. They accepted it as right and just, 
and all rejoiced as though they themselves had won. 
(One of the most charming traits of the " Apostles " 
of those days was the hearty enthusiasm — entirely free 
from envy — which the success achieved in any direc- 
tion by any one of them invariably aroused in the 
breasts of all his fellows. And this generous impulse 
appears to have been indigenous — an essential part of 
the nature and spirit of the '' Society " — a character- 
istic mark, notable from its inception and all through 
this period of its life. 

The next year Hallam tried again for the prize, but 
Kinglake's '' Byzantium " took it. The year after, no- 
thing daunted, he tried, in terza rima this time, but 
Venables carried it off by a poem in blank verse, the 
subject being '' The North-west Passage." 



134 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

(He, however, in 1830, gained the College prize for 
declamation, the subject being '' The Conduct of 
the Independent Party during the Civil War," an 
oration which excited general enthusiasm ; he de- 
livered it, it seems, with tremendous effect, and Milnes, 
after hearing it, said, " Hallam in all likelihood is to 
have the declamation prize. It was really splendid 
to see the poet Wordsworth's face — for he was there 
— kindle as Hallam proceeded with it." 

This visit of Wordsworth to the University was a 
joy to all the " Apostles." Hallam, who had loved 
him before, was inspired by being brought face to face 
with the old poet, who showed in a marked way his 
appreciation of the young one. Wordsworth stayed 
in Spedding's rooms and allowed himself to be wor- 
shipped by the" Society." On this memorable evening, 
they all assembled, we are told, and sat at the poet's feet 
— many of them in a literal sense, for the little sitting- 
room was crowded. They paid him the reverence due, 
not only to one who was already their laureate, but to 
one who appeared to their young eyes over-laden with 
years (though he was barely sixty). Some of the 
more earnest endeavoured to lure him into the 
arena of philosophical discussion, but Wordsworth 
wisely evaded their challenge and confined himself 
to a fervid oration on the picturesque subject of 
Revolutions. 

Hallam had by this time got his book of poems 
together, ready for printing. He was never happy 
unless he had poetic and literary interest to occupy him; 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 135 

he worked hard for the Athenaeum all the while Maurice 
had it, and also for the Metropolitan Quarterly, during ^• 
part of its career. He had Shelley's " Adonais " printed 
for the first time in England, and was by many of 
them always afterwards called by that name ; he 
made Keats known to the EngHsh pubHc ; he found a 
publisher for " Alfred's " poems, and accomplished 
the whole of the business part of the producing of 
that work for his friend. ) 

Kemble about this time said to Donne : 

" Hallam you know, and I hope like. He is an 
excellent man, full of high and noble qualities, and is 
young enough to become a greater and a better man 
than he is. You do not know Charles or Alfred 
Tennyson, both of whom are dying to know you ; the 
first opportunity you have of making their acquaint- 
ance, neglect it not. They are poets of the highest 
class. Charles has just published a small volume of 
sonnets, and his brother and Hallam are about to edit 
their poems conjointly. One day these men will he 
great indeed.'' 

Hallam, in sending Tennyson's mother her son's 
" Poems, chiefly Lyrical," sent also by the same carrier 
a volume of his own which he had just printed, ex- 
plaining that these were formerly intended to be 
printed with Alfred's, an end he had looked forward to 
with dehght, but reasons had obhged him to change his 
intention, and he adds : 

" I have little reason to apprehend your wasting 
much time over that book, when I send you along with 



136 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

it such a treasure in your son's poetry. He is a true 
and thorough poet, if ever there was one ; and though 
I fear his book is far too good to be popular, yet I have 
full faith that he has thrown out sparks that will kindle 
somewhere and will vivify young generous hearts in 
the days that are coming, to a clearer perception of 
what is beautiful and good." 

Hallam's friends and companions thought his own 
compositions somewhat too stately and severe for one 
so young, but they all acknowledged their loftiness and 
beauty ; and concerning his volume of poems he wrote, 
while sending a copy of it to Donne : 

'' I incline to hope that in respect of my being an 
* Apostle ' and a friend of some of your best friends, 
you will pardon the liberty I take in sending you a 
little book, which I have just committed the sin of 
printing, and was on the verge of committing the 
greater sin of publishing. You will find in it, I be- 
lieve, little or no poetry, but here and there perhaps 
some half developed elements of poetic thought, 
which, if the sun shine and the dews fall, may come 
hereafter to maturity. I hope in a short time to have 
the much greater pleasure of sending you a volume of 
Lyrical poems by Alfred Tennyson, of whom you cannot 
but have heard from Blakesley and others, and whose 
genius, I do not doubt, you will admire as much as we 
do. Friendship certainly plays sad pranks with one's 
judgment in these matters ; yet I think if I hated 
Alfred Tennyson as much as I love him, I could hardly 
help revering his imagination with much the same re- 
verence. The book will be small, but did not Samson 
slay some thousand Philistines with a jawbone ? and 
what hinders but a little 12 mo. of a hundred and fifty 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 137 

pages may in the land of a right and true spirit do the 
Lord's work against the PhiHs tines of this viperous 
generation ? His brother's sonnets you have seen, I 
am told, and I rejoice much that you like them ; but 
Charles, though he burns and shines, is a lesser light 
than Alfred. I do not understand from Spedding that 
you are likely to be in town any part of next month ; 
if you were, I know few things that would give me more 
pleasure than the opportunity which would thereby be 
afforded me of improving my acquaintance with you. 
I trust you will excuse my plaguing you with this note, 
and will believe me, 

" Yours very sincerely, 

A. H. Hallam. 
''Trinity College, 
'' Monday r 

In this tiny book there are two or three poems 
dedicated to Tennyson, one of which runs— - 

To A. T. 

Oh last in time, but worthy to be first. 

Of friends in rank, had not the father of good 

On my early spring one perfect gem bestowed, 

A friend, with whom to share the best, and worst. 

Him will I shut close to my heart for aye. 

There's not a fibre quivers there, but is 

His own, his heritage for woe or bliss. 

Thou would'st not have me such a charge betray, 

Surely, if I be knit in brotherhood 

So tender to that chief of all my love, 

With thee I shall not loyalty eschew, 

And well I ween not time, with ill or good, 

Shall thine affections e'er from mine remove, 

Thou yearner for all fair things and true. 

The earlier friend to whom he here alludes was young 
Gladstone. The poems — the earliest written almost 



138 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

in childhood — are naturally of unequal merits but all 
show brilliant promise and extraordinary beauty of 
thought. However Hallam might have developed 
as a poet, had he lived, his youthful efforts certainly 
do not lose by comparison with Tennyson's first 
published work. 

One little cry of his runs almost prophetically — 



I have lived little on this earth of sorrow, 
Few are the roses I have watched in blooming, 

Yet I would die. 

Intimate feelings, presences of grandeur, 
Thrills of sweet love for God and man await me, 

Yet I would die. 



Tennyson's volume was given of course to Brook- 
field, who wrote soon after receiving it : 

" My dear Hallam, — 

'' That I have had great inclination to write to you 
sooner, I profess, that I have not been without suffi- 
cient leisure, I am free to acknowledge, but that my 
brain has been ' dry as the remainder biscuit ' I am not 
at liberty to deny. At length, however, I tax my 
energies for three sides entirely in the hope of provok- 
ing, rather than deserving to myself, the pleasure of a 
reply. You have long ago discovered that (to convert 
Addison's bumptious metaphor) I carry most of my 
money loose in my pocket, and that my draughts upon 
my bank stand a marvellous chance of being dis- 
honoured. I premise this in order to disarm you if I 
be dull. You must not, in cataloguing me as a 
correspondent, look for many Birdisms ; my feathers, if 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 139 

I have any, moult when I would pluck them for quills ; 
and when seated in the deliberate solemnity of a letter, 
your paraquito droops into a penguin. Our house, 
too, is no aviary, and in the stupid fog of a ' serious and 
well-regulated family,' the lint-white and the throstle- 
cock get as hoarse as ravens. This mewing, however, 
will soon have an -end in a fresh plumage, and in a 
fortnight we will all up and crow once more in Trinity : 

Blow up the fire Gyp Haggis, 

Bring brandywine for three ; 
Bard Alfred, Bird William, and Clerk Arthur 

This night shall merry be. 

" I just discover that I might have saved you and 
myself much trouble by inscribing on the last side 
nothing more than a very large I. I will now, how- 
ever, try a few variations on U. I and U parted last 
at the Ball. I am particularly anxious to learn how 
many things you fancied yourself besides a Swan, a 
shower of gold, a Dragon, a Bull, and a flash of light- 
ning, according to Jupiter ; a finger and thumb going 
to crush a rose leaf, according to Alfred ; a shepherd 
seeking a pet lamb, according to Shenstone ; a quart 
or so of dew dropping upon a Violet, according to 
Waller ; a melody falling upon an ear that loves to 
hear it, according to (very probably) Mrs. Hemans ; a 
mountaineer chasing a Gazelle, according to Mirza 
Djami ; and a dove hastening home, according to all the 
world. I am aware that you would, like Grumio, ' knock 
me here soundly ' if you were here ; but a tender-boned 
thing hke myself feels that face to face and sheet to 
sheet are very different modes of intercourse. Stand- 
ing, therefore, like ^sop's goat on the house top. I 
beseech you, most valorous lion, to make a merit of 



140 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

necessity and tell me all that I know. Indite a few 
sighs ; they will reach me in very good appetite, as I 
am myself once more sobbing and floundering in that 
Fount of Love I told you of, having again encountered 
the bright, romantic, harp-plapng Sonnettee of last 
summer. By the way, it just occurs to me that a mind 
more apt than your own at malconstruction might 
think the allusions I have made to Jove more jovial 
than delicate, but I am sure you will credit me when 
I say that I meant the nonsense to be quite free from 
sense, i.e. to be altogether spiritual. I do not make 
this apology for the sake of the pun. 

'' I Constitutional Historo for the last few days, and 
find it would have been advisable to have Moddle Ogen 
first. I began the former by reason that I heard you 
pronounce it the moister book. I enjoy it very much, 
but will not commit myself by vague criticism. 

" I was delighted to find that Tennyson had been 
reviewed in the Westminster. I was about preparing 
a sort of Newspaper notice of the poems, with ex- 
tracts, for the Sheffield Courant ; but in the meantime 
the Editor had extracted, rather injudiciously, a part 
from the Westminster, so that I cannot now well do 
what I purposed. 

''I don't know whether this will find you in London 
or at Trinity ; if the latter remember me to them all. 
I think of leaving this place on Monday week, and 
going by Town, where I shall be on Tuesday. You 
may, perhaps, know that a requisition was getting up 
for me to stand for the Presidency of the Union next 
term. But if chance will have me King, chance may 
crown me, for I will not move in the matter. I shall 
hope to hear from you in a day or two. Direct W.H.B., 
Sheffield. 

" Lest you should think from the sublimities about 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 141 

moulting feathers, in the first side, that you are cor- 
responding with Warburton, I beg to add m3/self , 



My dear 



▼ 



(hearts being trumps), 
" Yours very affectionately, 
'' Wm. Henry Brookfield. 



The books here mentioned were of course Hallam's 
Constitutional History and his Middle Ages. 

Brookfield, in due course, was elected President of 
the Cambridge Union, having previously held the 
offices of Treasurer and Secretary in that Society, and 
it is possible that it was Hallam himself who wrote the 
review alluded to above, at all events he supplied the 
Englishman article — a part of which enthusiastic ap- 
preciation runs — 

"Mr. Tennyson belongs decidedly to the class we 
have already described as Poets of sensation. He 
sees all the forms of nature mth the ' erudiMis oculus,' 
and his ear has a fairy fineness. There is a strange 
earnestness in his worship of beauty which throws a 
charm over his impassioned song, more easily felt than 
described, and not to be escaped by those who have 
once felt it. We think he has more definiteness, and 
roundness of general conception, than the late Mr. 
Keats, and is much more free from blemishes of diction 
and hasty capriccios of fancy. . . . We have remarked 
five distinctive excellencies of his manner. First his 
luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his 
control over it. Secondly, his power of embodying 
himself in ideal characters, or rather moods of char- 
acter, with such extreme accuracy of adjustment that 



142 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

the circumstances of the narration seem to have a 
natural correspondence with the predominant feeHng, 
and^ as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative 
force. Thirdly, his vivid, picturesque delineation of 
objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds them 
all fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a 
medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of 
his lyrical measures, and exquisite modulations of har- 
monious words and cadences to the swell and fall of 
the feelings expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of 
thought, imphed in these compositions, and imparting 
a mellow soberness of tone, more impressive to our 
minds, than if the author had drawn up a set of opin- 
ions in verse, and sought to instruct the understanding 
rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the 
heart." 

Merivale, the " mildest of scoffers," says of this 
review in writing to W. H'. Thompson : 

" I think the only scene of general dissipation and 
prostration was at the Apostolic dinner, to which you 
were specially invited, and to which invitation you did 
not especially respond. It was said by the experienced 
to have succeeded particularly well. For myself, who 
had never seen such before, between admiration and 
wine, I felt like the traveller who says, ' I have found 
a new land, but I die,' the best part of it was the mutual 
recriminations of Spedding and Hallam for killing the 
Englishman, and their joint indignation at Blackwood 
for cutting him up after. 

" We had only three essays. Heath's on Niebiihr, for 
which I finished the debate by dropping something 
entirely foreign to the question ; Alford's (out of turn) 
on Christianity, in which Monteith, Tennant and 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 143 

Martin' avowed themselves Idolaters (I believe) ; and 
mine on Mrs. Trollope's America, which I undertook 
after attempting through the term to set the Latin 
particles to rights, and finding at last that I knew 
nothing about them." 

In seeking to stir and encourage Tennyson, who 
after the publication of his book went through a time 
of depression, Hallam would write : ** I have had an- 
other letter from Spedding, full of pleasant scoffs ; and 
another, two months old, extolling your book over 
sun, moon and stars," or he would say, " The hues to 
* J. S.' are perfect." 

Then he would assure the poet, and Brookfield too, 
that copies of the book had been sent round to all the 
"_ Apostles," and received by them with as flattering a 
freshness as if every word and every line in it had just 
come straight from the poet. Then, the black mood 
lasting, he and Tennyson went a tour together into the 
North, where they called on Brookfield and talked over 
future literary schemes, and " particularly discussed 
the older dramatists ! " 

An example of the spirit in which he worked for 
" Alfred " is shown in a letter to Merivale, whom he 
(with others) pressed into the same service — 

" The matter I entrust to you is to call upon Mr. 
Moxon, 64, New Bond Street, introducing yourself 
under shelter of my name and Alfred's, and to pop 
the question to him, * What do you pay your regular 
contributors ? What will you pay Alfred Tennyson 
for monthly contributions ? ' Also, while your hand 



144 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

is in, to ask whether, if Alfred was to get a new volume 
ready to be published next season, Moxon would give 
him anything for the copyright, and if anything, 
what ? You might dexterously throw in that I 
have a promise that any article I might write should 
be admitted either in the Edinburgh or Quarterly, 
and that I could vouch for the books being reviewed 
in one or both." 

This year Brookfield went in for the declamation 
prize — which he ultimately carried off. He had earlier 
asked Hallam's advice about his work, who had replied 
in the following words — 

** Dear Brooks, — 

" It was very kind of you to answer me so soon. I 
wish from my heart I could say or do anything of 
benefit to you in your sad disappointment. You will 
endeavour, I know, to endure with humility and to 
make it good for yourself to have been afflicted. I 
know it is hard to chain the Bay of Biscay ; yet there 
is One whose Spirit moves on the face of the waters 
evermore, as on the first day, bringing light and peace 
out of chaotic darkness and confusion. I am not 
talking thus from any sort of parade or affectation, 
but from the desire which I cannot but have, that 
you should feel, if possible, as I feel. 

" I have this moment heard that seven cases of 
Cholera have occurred in London, whither I was going 
on Friday. What if this note should be the last bit 
of chaff between us ? My intention has been to come 
to Cambridge about Saturday week : perhaps, how- 
ever, this news may make a difference ; it may not 
be right for me to leave home, unless the rest do — and 
it is possible Mrs. Tennyson may take it into her 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 145 

head that my visit is dangerous. Nobody that one 
meets seems to care at all about cholera now ; but it 
remains to be seen what the effects of it coming to 
town may be. 

" With regard to your Declamation. I am entirely 
without books at present and I do not carry much 
history in my head ; nevertheless, although I can't 
well sketch an outline, at least till I get more materials, 
I can give a hint or two. What think you of this 
subject — the persecuting of the Catholics under Eliza- 
beth ? There is much to be said on both sides. If 
you defend it, Southey's Book of the Church and 
VindicicB Ecclesice Anglicanoe are your books ; if 
not, Butler's Book of the Roman Catholic Church and 
Historical Memoirs of English, Irish and Scottish 
Catholics ; also Lingard's History, and my father's. 
I think it is a very good subject. On the one side 
you have the plots of the Jesuits, and partizans of 
Mary may be made the most of ; on the other the 
loyalty of Catholics against the Armada, the hardship 
of the acts against recusants, the execution of Campion 
and others, the use of torture, etc. If you do not 
relish this, I must endeavour to send you another. 

" Meantime, I send you two stanzas, kindly com- 
municated by Dr. Bowring, intended to form part of 
his forthcoming volume, entitled "pastorals of the Bug 
and Dnieper" : 

Old tree, thou art not the same 

I have loved of old, 
Tho' thou bearest no other name, 

'Tis another mould 
That thy broad roots hold : 
Other winds are round thee fighting. 

Old tree, tho' thou art not the same. 
Yet at morning tide, 
10— (2318) 



146 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

When the dawn mist nigh thee came, 

And the stirred branch sighed, 
I forgot all beside, 
And thought thee the tree I delight in. 

" Good-bye. Monteith's letter is not come. Give 
my correspondents notice that after Friday I am in 
London. Distribute my love. 

" Ever yours faithfully, 

"A. H. Hallam. 

" P.S. — I have not heard a syllable from Somersby, 
which rather worries me. Let me know if you have." 

Hallam, who kept up a correspondence with Tenny- 
son at Somersby — for the Tennyson's now filled his 
thoughts in delightful fashion — ^in talking to him of his 
essay on Professor Rossetti's Disquisizioni sullo spirito 
Antipapale, one of the most erudite and admirably 
balanced pieces of work that ever issued from so 
young a brain, complained to him : " The last time 
I sent you a publication of mine you did not even 
deign to read it. When should I have done the like 
by one of thine ? " 

And he said to Trench at this time : 

" Alfred's mind is what it always was ; or, rather, 
brighter and more vigorous. I regret, with you, that 
you have never had the opportunity of knowing more 
of him. His nervous temperament and habits of 
solitude give an appearance of ? affectation to his 
manner which is no interpreter of the man, and wears 
off on further knowledge. Perhaps you would never 
become very intimate, for certainly your bents of 
mind are not the same, and at some points they inter- 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 147 

sect ; yet I think you would hardly fail to see much 
for love, as well as for admiration." 

When he went up the Rhine with Tennyson in 1832, 
he is commonly supposed to have read six books of 
Herodotus to please his father, and to have plunged 
into David Hartley and Buhle's Philosophie Moderne 
for his own gratification. 

The following letter must have been sent soon after 
this expedition, and after he had taken his degree and 
left the College : 

" Dearest Brooks, — 

'' Well may you have thought my conduct atrocious, 
and atrocious in sober fact it may be considered ; but 
I have not been without excuse. When your first 
letter reached me, months ago, I was very unwell, 
and very wretched — not merely hipped, as usual, but 
suffering the pressure of a severe anxiety, which, 
although past, has left me much worn in spirit. As I 
began to get better Alfred came up to town, and 
persuaded me to go abroad with him. So we went to 
the Rhine for a month, and, as we had little coin 
between us, talked much of economy ; but the only 
part of our principles we reduced to practice was the 
reduction of such expenses as letter-writing, etc. 
Really, I often vowed to Alfred I would write to you, 
and as often he got into a pet, and jingled the bag of 
Naps, whose ringing sound began to come daily 
fainter on the ear, and their fair golden forms daily 
to occupy less space in the well-stuffed portmanteau. 
We have now returned, and are at Somersby. I fear 
I cannot stay here long ; but I snatch the gift of the 
hour, and am thankful. I have been very miserable 



148 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

since I saw you ; my hopes grow fainter and fewer, 
yet I hope on, and will, until the last ray is gone, and 

then . Emily, thank heaven, is better than she 

has been, and I think rather more cheerful. Somersby 
looks glorious in full pride of leafy summer. I would 
I could fully enjoy it ; but ghosts of the Past and 
wraiths of the Future are perpetually troubling me. 
I am a very unfortunate being ; yet, when I look into 
Emily's eyes, I sometimes think there is happiness 
reserved for me. Certainly I am by nature sanguine 
and hopeful : I was not framed for despondency. 
If circumstances were as I wish them, I hardly think 
I should moodily seek for new causes of disquiet. 

" I heard the other day from Trench ; he is at 
Stradbally, mild and happy, bless him ! and thinking 
about the Church and the Morning Watch still. 
Tennant is at Cambridge ; also Spedding — I saw them 
passing through. . . . Alfred is better in health and 
spirits than I have seen him this long while. 

" Now good-bye, old cove, for the present ; and 
prithee don't talk of alienation and all that, when 
thou writest next. If sometimes under the immediate 
touch of new pain or pleasure I do not look on all 
sides and remember how much existence there is out 
of my actual mood, why, bear with me a little ; it 
is selfish, but it is human ; a word, a tone, a look at 
any time, I believe, recalls me to a sense of what I 
owe to those whom I love, inter alios, to Master 
Brooks. 

" Believe me, therefore, always, 

"Your very affectionate, 

"A. H. H." 

The depressions and the apprehensive fears from 
which Tennyson, Hallam, and sometimes even Brook- 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 149 

field, suffered, were not exactly of the nature which 
had distracted at times Sterhng, Maurice and Tiench : 
the despondencies of the former were mainly mystical, 
while those of the latter were invariably theological. 

Hallam was at that time making an earnest en- 
deavour to obtain a living for Trench, which however, 
to the disappointment of both, but especially of 
Hallam, came to nothing. This busying of himself 
on behalf of his friends was a favourite and charac- 
teristic pastime wdth Arthur Hallam. He did it for 
all ; his heart was full of a tender and thoughtful 
generosity. Trench, writing to Donne a little later, 
says : "Of Hallam I know nothing. If you can in- 
form me on this point, pray do so. Some one told me 
he was reading History with his father, who, I suppose, 
supplies the facts, and Arthur the philosophy." 

But Arthur was reading Blackstone. His father, 
not quite sure of the bent of that *' adventurous 
mind," had entered him at Inner Temple, thinking 
the Law would be a useful discipline to a poetic dis- 
position such as his ; but Arthur writes to Brook- 
field : 

" My dear Brooks, — 

" Although you hinted, when I was with you, that 
you had an objection to short letters, you can hardly 
expect me to reform my conduct in this respect at 
present. Indeed, I find no sort of time as yet for 
anything the interest of which is not strictly con- 
fined within the walls of Somersby. How I am to 
read Blackstone here is one of those m^rsteries which 



150 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

I consider insoluble by human reason ; even Dante, 
even Alfred's poetry, is at a discount. 

" Dear Brooks, you encouraged me to write personal 
twaddle, and I have need of telling you how happy I 
have been, am, and seem likely to be. I would you 
were happy too ; for, however I trust your friendship, 
and know besides that the mind takes a strange 
delight sometimes in the contemplation of moods 
more joyous than its own, I cannot but feel that there 
must mingle some pain with your knowledge of my 
joy. All things hitherto I have found as well, better 
than I could have expected. Emily is not apparently 
in a state of health that need much disquiet me, and 
her spirits are, as I hoped, more animated by confi- 
dence and hope. Every shadow of — not doubt, but 
uneasiness, or what else may be a" truer name for the 
feeling that Alfred's language sometimes casts over 
my hopes — is destroyed in the full blaze of conscious 
delight with which I perceive that she loves me. 
And I — I love her madly ; I feel as though I had 
never known love till now. The love of absence I 
had known, and searched its depths with patient care, 
but the love of presence me thinks I knew not, for 
heretofore I was always timid and oppressed by the 
uncertain vision of futurity, and the warning narrow- 
ing form of the present. (1 am writing arrant non- 
sense — never mind.) Now I feel above consequence, 
freed from destiny, at home with happiness. Never 
before have I known at one moment the luxury of 
actual delight, the reasonable assurance of its pro- 
longation through a happy life, and the peace which 
arises out of a tranquil conscience to sanctify and 
establish all the rest. Not without the blessing of 
God has this matter been brought thus far : I humbly 
hope this is a sign of its continuance, but I believe I 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 151 

speak my heart when I say that, eagerly as I love her, 
I truly desire to submit all my hopes and desires to 
the love of God, and that it would cost me little to 
lose the highest blessings of this life, would God but 
grant me — 

' Soul to soul to grow deathless hers.' 

" Do you want details of what I do ? I know not 
where to begin ; yet, to be a little more sober, I will 
try to bethink me of what has occurred. I found no 
great fear of cholera ; thanks to shortsightedness or 
something, nobody found out the Marylebone case in 
the paper, though there it was, large as life — or death, 
I should say. Alfred is, as I expected, not apparently 
ill ; nor can I persuade myself anything real is the 
matter. His spirits are better, his habits more 
regular, his condition altogether healthier. He is 
fully wound up to publication, and having got £100 
from Mrs. Russell, talks of going abroad. C. and F. 
are well ; the former has written two sonnets ; all 
three have taken to digging — one more resemblance of 
Somersby to Paradise. Several things are changed 
here since my former visits ; some for the worse, 
e.g., Emily and Mary have shamefully neglected their 
singing. I marvel at your indulgent mention, on the 
faith of a lover, they sang six times as well two years 
ago. Part of my mind is cut away by it. There are 
no horses rideable, which is a bore ; on the other 
hand, there are curtains in the dining-room, which is 
a lounge. Charles sleeps much less, but never reads. 
I have been endeavouring to find time to teach 
Horatio his Latin, but since the strange revolution in 
the course of nature by which the number of hours in 
the day has become so much smaller, it is difficult, 
you know, to find time and leisure for anything. 
Much Italian lesson goes on after breakfast : ' amo 



152 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

ami/ etc. Mary seems well, and learns Italian 
prettily ; nevertheless, . I think her somewhat dimin- 
ished in beauty since my former sojourn. I am 
an impartial judge certainly, for I looked much less 
at her face then than now. The whole state of the 
music is sadly inferior to what it used to be : I must 
try to reform things . . . 

''Write home, will you ? Tell me about all things, 
especially yourself. I believe M. and G. must come 
here : Fred, seems to have changed his mind, and I 
am sure I have not. More of this. Love to Trench, 
and the few. 

'' Very affectionately yours, 

" A. H. H." 

Hallam's engagement to Emily Tennyson was in 1832 
an accomplished fact. Did he not write, " I am now 
at Somersby — not only as the friend of Alfred Tenny- 
son, but as the lover of his sister ? " And the happiness 
which showed its first gleam in this letter shed an 
unwaning light over the remainder of his days. 

Brookfield, Garden and Spedding were of those 
favoured ones who gathered at the Tennysons that 
summer, when — 

O Bliss, when all in circle drawn 
About him, heart and ear were fed 
To hear him, as he lay and read 
The Tuscan Poets on the lawn. 

It was then that they stayed up so late talking 
that the morning came upon them unawares, when, 
instead of retiring to rest, they walked over the hills 
in order to meet the sunrise. 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 153 

Arthur, during the time he was teaching his young 
betrothed Itahan, once said to her — in prophetic 
vein — '' Many ages after we all have been laid in dust, 
young lovers of the beautiful and the true may seek 
in faithful pilgrimage the spot where Alfred's mind was 
moulded." There is no evidence that his previous 
attachment " To one early loved, now in India," was 
more than a bo5rish enthusiasm. His affection for 
his friend's sister was the great and real emotion of his 
young life, and rounds off and completes a career of 
singular beauty. He was not well during the spring 
of 1833 ; he wrote to Brookfield complaining of the 
" frequent touches of illness " which attacked him, and 
Kemble said : " Hallam has gone back to Cambridge. 
He was not well^while he was in London ; moreover, he 
was submitting himself to the influences of the outer 
world more than (I think) a man of his genius ought 
to do." This had regard to the extraordinary gaiety 
which came upon him during his last days, while 
Blakesley wrote : '' Alfred Tennyson is in town with 
the professed purpose of studying the Elgin marble. 
Hallam is fatter,'' which looks as if they were even 
then concerned for his health. It was during this 
London visit that the young men endeavoured to get 
Henry Hallam's opinion upon the merits of Alfred's 
new work, " (Enone " — but, to their distress, " he was 
called away in the middle of Venus," and therefore 
never heard the poem through. 

Hallam was now studying law in some earnest, 
though to his friends he would say, sometimes lightly 



154 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

sometimes sadly, that he should do little as a barrister, 
and implied that it was only to please his father he 
went on with it at all, while he seemed to cherish the 
hope that something would one day lead him into 
another more congenial walk of hfe. '; 

Of his poetic work, " To Two Sisters " — verses 
written to Emily and Mary Tennyson — ^is the most 
complete after his '' Meditative Fragments "; but 
in '' A Scene in Rome " we get this striking passage : 

a dark night waits us — 
Another moment, we must plunge within it — 
Let us not mar the ghmpses of pure Beauty, 
Now streaming in Hke moonhght, with the fears. 
The joys, the hurried thoughts, that rise and fall 
To the hot pulses of a mortal heart. 

( 
His poems — all too few ! — are scholarly in form, 

and full of fancy and picturesqueness. But it is to 
his essays we must turn if we would appreciate, even 
partially, the wide extent of his knowledge, the sound- 
ness of his judgment, the readiness of his resource, the 
brilliancy of his style, and, conspicuous above all, the 
unvarying loftiness of his aim. 

Before Hallam went off on his last journey with his 
father, he assisted one night at a supper given in 
Tennyson's rooms — a festival which was kept up till 
4 a.m. Next day he and Alfred and " a troup of 
them " called on Rogers in order to see his pictures, 
and being left for a little in that gentleman's library, 
looked through his books. To their chagrin, they 
found in a place of honour Charles Tennyson's sonnets, 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 155 

but no trace of a poem by Alfred ! Soon after this 
Hall am wrote to Tennyson, then in Scotland, " I feel 
a strong desire to write to you, a yearning for dear 
old Alfred comes upon me," and he sent him Hartley 
Coleridge's poems. And to Miss Tennyson he sent 
a present of the Pensees de Pascal and Silvio 
Pellico. Then Trench gives the information : 
"... Hallam is or has been in Germany with his 
father. He was most absurdly gay last season, a 
mood and habit so unsuited to his character that I 
cannot believe the tendency will last long." 

On September 6, 1833, Arthur Hallam wrote a letter full 
of praise of a gallery of pictures, and sent it to Tenny- 
son, with the end six lines of one of his " Fragments " — 

I do but mock me with these questionings. 

Dark, dark, yea — " irrecoverably dark " 

Is the soul's eye : yet how it strives and battles 

Through th' impenetrable gloom to fix 

That master light, the secret truth of things, 

Which is the body of the Infinite God. 

Nine days later he lay dead in Vienna from a pres- 
sure of blood upon the brain. 

As the news of his death arrived in England, it was 
received with profound despair ; all felt " a light had 
been extinguished," and each of his friends dreaded 
to tell the other, and when they did, they said, " We 
must be more earnest workers since the labourers are 
fewer," and grieved openly over the blasting of 
the schemes and anticipations they had formed 
for him. The Tennysons were the last to hear the 



156 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

news officially, but by-and-by Mr. Hallam sent word 
of it to them through his brother-in-law, Mr. Elton, 
and when he himself wrote, it was to urge them — poor 
father — '' not to grieve." 

Arthur Hallam was twenty-two years of age when he 
died. Though the amount of actual work he produced 
in his few years of life may not be great, yet it is sure 
that few people born into this world ever in so short 
an existence made such an impression upon his fellows 
of distinct individuality and uncommon power as did 
this gifted youth. Knowledge, success, friendship, 
love, all were his, and each in its most perfect form. 
It is useless to speculate as to what this attractive 
genius might or might not have performed had he but 
lived. 

" There was nothing in the region of the mind 
which he might not have accomplished," said Glad- 
stone, who thought that Hallam was probably the one 
meant to right this world and to deal with it compre- 
hensively. " I mourn in him, for myself, my earliest 
near friend ; for my fellow creatures, one who would 
have adorned his age and country, a mind full of 
beauty and of power, attaining almost to that ideal 
standard of which it is presumption to expect an 
example. When shall I see his like ? " 

When Kemble wrote to his sister Fanny to announce 
Hallam's death, he said — 

" It is a bitter blow to all of us . . . most of all to 
the Tennysons, whose sister Emily he was to have 



ARTHUR H. HALLAM 157 

married. I have not yet had the courage to write to 
Alfred. This is a loss which will most assuredly be 
felt by this age, for if ever man was born for great 
things, he was. Never was a more powerful intellect 
joined to a purer and holier heart ; and the whole 
illuminated with the richest imagination, with the 
most sparkling yet the kindest wit. One cannot 
lament for him that he is gone to a far better life, but 
we weep over his coffin and wonder that we cannot 
be consoled ; the Roman epitaph on two young 
children,' * Sibimet ipsis dolorem abstulerunt, suis 
reliquere ' (from themselves they took away pain, 
to their friends they left it), is always present in my 
mind, and somehow the miserable feeling of loneliness 
comes over one even though one knows that the dead 
are happier than the living." 

Monckton Milnes, in dedicating a volume of poems 
to Henry Hallam, a month after Arthur's death, said — 

" In offering this little book to your name, I am 
paying my feeble but ardent homage to him who is 
gone. We, the contemporaries of your dear son, are 
deprived not only of a beloved friend, of a delightful 
companion, but of a most wise and influential coun- 
cillor in all the serious concerns of existence ; of an 
incomparable critic in all our literary efforts, and of 
the example of one who was as much before us in 
everything else as he now is in the way of life." 

And Spedding wrote — 

" The compositions which he has left, marvellous 
as they are, are inadequate evidence of his actual 
powers. ... I have met no man his equal as a 
philosophical critic on works of taste ; no man whose 



158 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

views on all subjects connected with the duties and 
dignities of humanity were more large, more generous, 
and enlightened." 

And while remembrances and memorials of him accu- 
mulated and multiplied, there came at last, in 1850, 
from the poet Tennyson, his dear and cherished friend, 
the greatest elegiac in the English language — the 
grandest monument that ever perpetuated a memory. 



CHAPTER VIII 

JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 

Thou art no Sabbath-drawler of old saws 
Distilled from some worm-canker' d homily ; 
But spurr'd at heart with fiercest energy 
To embattail and to wall about thy cause. 

Thou from a throne 
Mounted in heaven will shoot into the dark 
Arrows of lightnings. I will stand and mark. 

(Tennyson) 

John Kemble, '' Jacky Kemble " " Anglo Saxon 
Kemble " the brightest and cheeriest of the " Apos- 
tles/' possessed all the intuition, all the genial flow 
and spirit, all the alluring grace and genius of the 
talented family to which he belonged ; and to these 
gifts were added profound erudition and wide mental 
capacity. 

With Spedding, Donne, and Edward Fitzgerald, 
he was educated at the Grammar School of Bury St. 
Edmunds, where he was esteemed by his companions 
a studious lad with strong literary proclivities. 
He was much admired by these early friends, over 
whom as a boy he towered intellectually ; his studies 
taking him even in early days into paths so unusual 

159 



i6o THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

for a youth, that he sometimes outstripped his teachers : 
his guides frequently losing sight of him, only to find 
him later on — far ahead, showing them the road. 

For a period he printed for himself — with a toy hand- 
press, a newspaper, six inches square, in the style of 
a daily journal — a publication which was the delight 
of his circle and which he filled with compositions 
of his own. Prose or poetry — nothing came amiss : 
but it is evident he then excelled in verse. He 
had in him as great an amount of the poetic fervour 
as any of the group he afterwards joined ; and they, 
without exception, whether they exercised their gifts 
or not in after life, seem all to have been poets in 
boyhood. 

At Bury St. Edmunds he gained an exhibition 
which took him to Cambridge, where he arrived with 
the fairest of prospects before him, and the makings 
of a great man within him. This was loudly pro- 
claimed by all his friends, and these in his first year 
included Maurice, Sterling, Buller and Trench — to 
which bright list he added other brilliant names, 
as they came to the fore. 

At Sterling's suggestion he was made an '' Apostle " 
and he became one of the *' Society's " most popular 
speakers — not only on account of his oratorical powers, 
which were considerable, but also because " bitter 
with politics " (a bitterness " Apostolic " tradition in 
no way discouraged) he had strong likes and dislikes 
which flavoured the flow of his eloquence with 
either the sweetness of enthusiasm or the acridity 




John Mitchell Kemble 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE i6i 

of vituperation. His speeches never had the in- 
sipidity due to lack of prejudice. Much as the 
" Apostles " expected from one another, they seem to 
have expected most from John Mitchell Kemble. 
Of none of them have clearer, better defined pictures 
been left ; pictures which, by whomsoever traced, give 
invariably a vivid impression of power and of pleasant- 
ness. Yet Kemble was the one of the " Apostles " 
on whom perhaps their divergent teachings left the 
deepest mark, and if these marks did not, thanks to 
his natural sense and independent spirit, leave him 
rebellious or discontented, yet they interfered with 
his outlook and prevented him from achieving the 
conventional satisfaction or extraordinary reward 
which the " Society " predicted and hoped for him. 
He gave his mind early to the science of politics, 
and kept up his interest in this subject so closely that 
his classics and mathematics suffered in consequence. 
Though, on the other hand, he gained through this 
study an amount of general information which ren- 
dered him of the greatest assistance to literary 
'* Apostles " and an " oracle " in their eyes. 

The matter and the style of his numerous letters — 
which wherever they occur gild and embellish the 
memoirs of Trench, Tennyson, Merivale and Donne — 
show the vigour of his mind and the acuteness of his 
critical faculties, and also the position he held in the 
confidence and affection of those great men. The 
" Apostles," who all of them loved him, decided 
that " Jacky " Kemble was to become a burning 

light. He was to go into the Church ; put that 

II— (2318) 



i62 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

establishment in order and, so soon as he should have 
achieved therein a sufficiently authoritative position, 
re-arrange and control the religions and politics of 
the entire world. He had his '* black " time — ^when 
seeing he was not fulfiUing his own promise he cried 
out, " If I could read mathematics with Blakesley or 
sleep on the sofa with Hallam or Donne in the day- 
time, I might be a happier man." 

He was extraordinarily handsome with the noble 
brow and fine-cut classical features which have ever 
distinguished his family. Gronow says of the 
Kembles : " There is not only the stamp of genius 
and talent of a high order in this gifted family, but 
also a certain nobihty of mind and feeling. We might 
say of one of them, ' He or she comes of good stock,' 
and expect from them a kind word, a generous im- 
pulse, a self-denying action. No mean thought could 
take its birth in those grand broad foreheads, expres- 
sive of the majestic calmness of strength and power, 
and these full, firm, kind lips could not give vent to 
petty, spiteful, or malicious words. They were of the 
men and women one meets sometimes in good old 
England ; not of the common clay, but cast in the 
Titanic mould. Would there were more such in our 
days of mediocrity." 

When Hallam and Tennyson first came to College, 
Kemble welcomed them in enthusiastic whole-hearted 
style. It was he who got people together to hear the two 
engage with himself in " magnificent conversations." 
He bowed before Hallam^ who was always greatly 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 163 

attached to him, and he said of Tennyson, whom he 
admired exceedingly, " In Alfred's mind the mater- 
ials of the very greatest works are heaped in an abun- 
dance which is almost confusion." 

Frequent were the festivals in which " Apostles " 
and " philo-apostles " talked many suns down in 
Kemble's, Tennyson's, Hallam's, or Spedding's rooms. 
And sometimes Kemble would at these meetings betray 
a trace of inborn theatrical instinct ; as when, on one 
occasion, after a late convivial sitting, it transpired 
that one of the party had playfully hidden his " mortar- 
board." Kemble seriously resented the liberty, and 
with fire flashing from his eyes he exclaimed, in tragic 
tones, " Whosoever it were, had better have touched 
a sleeping tiger than that cap ! " 

When he took up the study of Anglo-Saxon he began 
to spend his vacations in Germany in order to take 
courses at various Universties there ; and Trench 
said once to him — 

" You tell me nothing of your plans and I have no 
right or wish, beyond the great interest I take in them. 
It is with no selfish desire of retaining the pleasure of 
your company that I express my earnest hope that 
you will not fulfil your intention of quitting this 
country. I am sure you could do much more good for 
yourself and others here." 

Sterling was apprehensive of the result of German 
thought upon him ; but by the time Kemble went to 
Germany a second time, he had passed through his 



i64 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

undecided phase^ and had made up his mind to enter 
the Church ; and Tennyson had written the very fine 
sonnet upon him which begins — 

My hope and heart is with thee — thou wilt be 
A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest 
To scare Church-harpies from the master's feast ; 
Our dusted velvets have much need of thee. 

It was at Munich that he first heard his sister Fanny 
was about to make an appearance upon the stage. He 
took up a newspaper and saw — " Miss F. Kemble will 
appear in ' Juliet/ " which news, utterly unexpected 
by him, gave him, he says, " the sensation of a cold 
sword run through his heart." 

Back again at Cambridge he was one of the actors 
in Much Ado About Nothing, on the occasion when 
Milnes, who made a somewhat portly Beatrice, as he 
delivered the words, " He is no less than a stuffed man, 
but for the stuffing — well, we are all mortal," fell 
through his couch to the floor of the stage, and before 
he was buried beneath his petticoats uttered an ejacu- 
lation entirely out of keeping with the character he was 
playing. To Donne, Kemble said of this performance — 

'' Conceive Hallam and myself setting our faces and 
taming ourselves into stupidity, that we might pre- 
sent some distant resemblance of ' Verges ' and ' Dog- 
berry.' I can assure you if laughing be a criterion, 
no company ever did better, for from first to last, 
especially during the tragic scenes, the audience were 
in a roar." 

While Tennant at the same time sent to the same 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 165 

gentleman a delightful specimen of an " Apostolical '* 
letter — 

" Dear Donne, — 

" There are reasons infinite for your putting the 
accompanjdng volume of Coleridge on your shelf for 
me : first, because I stole your Queen Mab, which I 
do not intend to return, but this will relieve my con- 
science ; fifthly, the book in respect that it is a book 
is a good book, though in respect it is Coleridge's it 
might have been better ; thirdly and lastly, I want 
you to read it ; and so conclude I want it to be bought 
and have no hopes of your buying it. Confound it ! I 
have got into this ' Dogberry ' arithmetic from hearing 
Kemble act in Much Ado, etc., this evening. Milnes 
was manager of the concern, and in propria persona 
(credite poster i !) played ' Beatrice ' ! Thirlwall, I verily 
expected, would have died with most wicked laughter, 
when ' Beatrice ' lifted up her veil — had he not laughed 
again and cured himself homoeopathetically — (if you 
cannot read you must spell — Groemm est). Kemble 
was 'Dogberry,' and Hallam took 'Verges' : all 
three acted extremely well, but Kemble excellently, 
except that he enjoyed it rather too much himself. 
An Epilogue by Milnes (extremely good) was tacked 
on. You will, I believe, receive with this a packet of 
letters from all your correspondent Cantabs from 
whom you will learn that Blakesley is going to trouble 
us with his presence at Trinity : I speak seriously 
when I say trouble, for I am afraid he stands a better 
chance of a Fellowship than is pleasant for a rival to 
think of : could you not contrive to get him to join 
your hunts, etc., and cause him to break his neck ; or 
drown him in love, whereby he may grow poetical and 
indulge that ' wise passiveness ' which the rude 



t66 the CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

vulgar call idleness ; or convert him to Atheism, so 
that he may not be able to take the oaths ? The last 
however, is, I am afraid, hopeless, for should we suc- 
ceed in making him an Atheist, it by no means follows 
that he could not subscribe the thirty-nine articles 
which are acknowledged to be, in their true and secret 
mystical interpretation, most decidedly Atheistical — 
at least so S asserted last Saturday, to the aston- 
ishment of the wise and good, who begin to think him 
rather profane and attribute it to his associating and 
corresponding with you ! 

'^ In order to ascertain the truth of this, I am com- 
missioned by certain religious members of the Wise 
Society to receive as many letters as I can get from 
you, by which you are to be tried, and if found guilty 
thou shalt die the death. 

"' To tell the truth, I have sent Coleridge by way 
of a trap, that I might tempt you to blaspheme ! 

" A preface, to be neat, should begin in the middle 
of one page, fill the next, and break off in the middle 
of the third : and so should an introductory letter of a 
series : if you will continue the series, by mine honour 
I will thank you, and so farewell." 

Tennant was, of course, an '' Apostle ", and a great 
friend of Kemble and of Donne. 

It is impossible to speak of Kemble without mention- 
ing Donne, for their friendship was one of the especially 
close and beautiful attachments of those times. A 
scholar and a gentleman, William Bodham Donne was 
an " Apostle " of the earlier group and possessed of all 
the fineness of aim and all the graver habits of thought 
which characterized that set, and to such an extent 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 167 

that he, after due consideration, left Cambridge without 
taking his degree, because he could not conscientiously 
subscribe to the formula of adherence to Estabhshed 
Church doctrines. It is owing to this step and his 
premature secession from the University that there 
are so many " Apostolic " letters directed to him — 
the Apostles making it a point of honour to keep him 
posted up with news. He occupied a high place in 
the minds and hearts of the " wise and good " and was 
himself of a most loveable and courtly disposition. He 
afterwards did subscribe, though he did not enter the 
Church. Hallam and he were especially happy to- 
gether, and writing once to him Hallam said, " I 
expect you to be properly grateful to me for sending 
you by these presents another poem, of which to say 
that I love it would be only saying that it is his (i.e. 
Tennyson's)." 

fi Kemble gives a good idea of Donne in one of his 
letters to Trench — 

" I recommend you to make as short work as you can 
of reinstating yourself in my favour, by directing a 
long and philosophical and delightful epistle to me at 
Donne's. As I know you have seen the worthy in- 
dividual whom I am about to visit at no very distant 
period, I think it possible you might know that that 
pleasure was in store for me. I wish most sincerely 
that you could be added to the circle : how delightfully 
we might spend a week or two together ! For of all 
the unaffected worthy fellows that ever it was my 
lot to fall in with I know none more estimable than 
Donne, or one whose talents are more fitted to render 



i68 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

admirable a character which always would be amiable. 
My own intercourse with him has been long and inti- 
mate, and little as I have to boast of, to him I owe 
much of that little. I anticipate a most pleasurable 
time with him." 

To which Trench replied — 

" I perfectly agree with you in your estimate of our 
friend Donne's character. I should look back upon 
my Cambridge career with mingled regret for wasted 
time, etc., were it not for the friendships I have formed 
and opinions I have imbibed (but for these I owe the 
University nothing) and among these connexions I 
look on none with greater pleasure than my election 
to the Apostles, and trust that it will prove a connexion 
that will not be dissolved with many of its members 
during life." 

While Donne shows his appreciation of Kemble in 
glowing words — 

" Ten days (alas ! how brief) did I pass delightfully 
and profitably with Kemble in Westminster. I felt 
that it was good for him to go to Germany, his spiritual 
cradle, for all home-cradles are fast becoming fitter 
for Iphiclus than for Hercules ; but I cannot tell you 
of the feeling with which I regarded my own part in 
such a separation. For many years he had been to 
me even as a brother, for no brother could be more 
earnest in his affection or constantly zealous in well- 
doing. He had shared my inmost thoughts, the very 
firstlings of my spirit ; he had become as one of my 
own home-circle, and he made me to know and to look 
up to you before we were personally acquainted. I 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 169 

had seen him enslaved for a time by the specious de- 
lusion of falsehood and unphilosophy ; yet, since his 
spirit and his affections retained their childhood fresh- 
ness, I knew that it was his understanding only that 
betrayed him, and foresaw the day of his regeneration. 
It came, and I now reverence him as earnestly as 
before I fervently loved him. It was not a brand 
snatched from the burning ; he was merely strewed over 
awhile by dead ashes and parching dust ; and when 
he uprose from among them the dust and ashes flew 
away, and he walked forth strong and willing, and 
working the good. He has written once to me since 
he arrived in Germany — a letter full of hope and faith 
and ancient earnestness — and I expect another very 
soon from Munich." 

Kemble took his degree in 1830, and had started off 
to Germany, as though never to return from that 
country. He found there, he imagined, all he wanted 
in the way of life ; the Germans with their deeper 
tone of thought and more deliberate methods of study, 
suited him well — yet, for a possible curacy in England 
he gave up all and returned in summary fashion. 
Trench about this time came back from a period of 
foreign travel, his mind also turned towards the 
Church ; but as they were gravely laying their plans 
they were both lured by Sterling into the Spanish 
business. And into this they entered heart and soul, 
with all the fearless enthusiasm which characterized 
them both. Trench convinced by his friends said and 
believed that " Spain had need of him and the ' soldier- 
priest/ " and away they crept from England, certain 



170 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

that they were about to change the destinies of Spain 
and half expecting to be hanged for doing it. 

Before they went, though, they decided, if they 
returned aUve, they would go '' back to Trinity " and 
attend Divinity Lectures there. Trench made a stay 
of many months in Spain, but when he saw the hope- 
lessness of the " cause " did not think it wise to 
stay and struggle against the impossible, so returned 
to his anxious friends. But Kemble refused to accom- 
pany him. He insisted upon staying to '' see the end." 
His sister Fanny says — " John's heart failed him at 
the thought of forsaking Torrijos, and there were 
rumours at one time in England that he had been 
caught and was to be tried for his life." Every one 
spoke admiringly of his extraordinary pluck ; and 
calm-eyed, calm-minded Trench, who saw and knew 
the rough and smooth of all of them, said of him, 
*' Kindliness is the pervading life of his character, 
and what renders genial his knowledge, his hospitality 
and his many admirable qualities." But the Spanish 
Conspiracy dragged its course along many weary 
months, during which nothing occurred to encourage, 
while innumerable impediments arranged themselves 
in an inflexible barrier about it — and finally even 
Kemble was persuaded reluctantly to return. 

He began now to throw himself more earnestly 
into philology and rather to retreat somewhat from the 
idea of the Church, though he attended some theo- 
logical lectures. 

One of his irreverent friends used to tell a story at 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 171 

Cambridge concerning Kemble and this expedition, 
which ran as follows — 

" When Jacky Kemble returned from the Torrijos 
affair in Spain, to College, he had a story of adventure 
which had three versions. In the first, say in the stage 
of friendly confidence, he would say — ' I once strayed 
beyond our lines alone and unarmed and suddenly 
came upon fifteen Spanish Grenadiers, who were closing 
round me, when I took to my heels, and though pursued 
by a few shots, escaped with my life and unharmed.' 
Somewhat later the version began in the same way as 
the first, but proceeded — * I disarmed them — most 
of 'em — wounded several — and the rest fled, with the 
Devil take the hindmost.' The third, or three o'clock 
in the morning version, commenced like the others, 
but continued — ' they fell at my feet to a man and 
implored mercy.' ' Well, what did you do, Jacky ? 

did you let them go ? ' ' No, by G , I slew them 

all ! ' " 

There was for a long time so much of the conspirator 
left in John Kemble that often in Fitzgerald's rooms 
— Thackeray present, with whom he was always close 
friends at College — he would with fervour sing the 
revolutionary song, which he had probably carolled 
often in Gibraltar, *' Si un Elio conspiro allero." 

He published Beowulf in 1833, and was upon that 
made lecturer of Anglo-Saxon to the University. All 
rejoiced exceedingly at this signal success, and 
especially Arthur Hallam, who was enchanted to find 
Kemble spoken of in the highest terms as one of " our 
best Anglo-Saxon scholars for real learning and 



172 THE CAMBRIDGE '^APOSTLES" 

capacity of his subject." In sending Beowulf to 
Tennyson, Kemble said to him — " I love you heartily 
and wish you were with us. I wish you could come 
and dine with the ' Apostles ' on Monday next. I 
am not sure that Donne and Trench will not be with 
us. . . . Are there no Gardener's Grand-daughters ? " 
And he wrote to Trench — 

" Alfred Tennyson is about to give the world a 
volume of stupendous poems, the lowest toned of 
which is strung higher than the highest of his former 
volumes. He has been in London for some time, and a 
happy time it was : a happy time and a holy time, for 
it is the mighty privilege of such men to spread their 
own glory around them. . . . We had a fine re-union 
of choice spirits of an evening then : Hallam, Spedding 
and his brother, the two Heaths, and Merivale — the 
kindest hearted and one of the mildest of scoffers." 

While Trench, now a curate, wrote to him about 
this time — 

" My dear Kemble, — 

" I sometimes hear in a roundabout way concerning 
you, but from yourself never. Donne tells me that 
you sometimes write to him — and therefore I will not 
give you up. I suppose you say in your heart ' They 
hate us youth ' ; however it is not so. Could you 
not come and pay us a visit here the end of this week 
or the beginning of next. The ensuing week to that 
I am going, D.V., to pay Donne a short visit, and per- 
haps shall move like a Patriarch with my wife and 
little one, though I cannot tarry many days. You 
probably are not aware of the alteration of our plans 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 173 

since last I saw you. Mr. Rose's health will not enable 
him to remain here^ as he finds the climate to dis- 
agree with him more than that of any other place — he 
has therefore exchanged this living for a much smaller 
one, where he will not need my assistance. We pro- 
bably shall find ourselves free at the end of next 
month. 

" I cannot but regret the prospect of my connexion 
with one who is both a Christian, a scholar, and a gentle- 
man being dissolved, though it is not so much a matter 
of regret to leave this part of England. It is to me 
sadly out of the way : has little of natural beauty to 
recommend it, and except that one may here as well 
as in another place serve one's generation, by the will 
of God, I would not have chosen it at the first. I 
hope you have some fair prospect of a curacy, and shall 
be glad to see you fairly established among your own 
people — you will soon find yourself grow attached to 
them and they to you, so that a parting even after a 
few months' residence among them, would be suffi- 
ciently grievous. I am sure that I find it so here, 
and have great heaviness in my heart to think that I 
shall see their faces no more. At this moment, too, 
one begins to think of all the shortcomings, of how 
much more one might have done, if one had given up 
himself more to the work and less to the indulgence 
of the body or the mind — which last is more likely to be 
both your and my temptation. I am sure if we take 
these things in hand, we shall never find much 
peace or satisfaction of conscience except in giving 
ourselves wholly to them. 

" The responsibihty of a minister's office, even 
though one may have faced and contemplated it from 
the first, grows mightily upon one. 

" I forgot to tell you that I cannot give you a 



174 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

bed, but there is a Hostel neighbouring. I make no 
apologies for this apparent inhospitality. 

"Yours affectionately, 

" R. C. Trench." 

But there was no curacy for Kemble. He now, to 
the distress of his family, gave up all idea of Holy 
Orders. His sister Fanny complaining of this change 
of plan, says — 

* ' This romantic expedition ' ' (withTorrij os) " cancelled 
all his purposes and prospects of entering the Church, 
and Alfred Tennyson's fine sonnet addressed to him 
when he first determined to dedicate himself to the 
service of the temple is all that bears witness to 
that short-lived consecration : it was poetry but not 
prophecy." 

When Kemble married, which he did early, Donne 
said to Blakesley : " I did look for him never to marry^ 
but the shock of surprise was much milder than if it 
had been told me that Spedding had sacrificed himself 
to the good of posterity." 

But he married and settled down to a life of study. 
He did a good deal of profound work, and amongst 
other things edited the British and Foreign Review. 
We find Trench saying to him — 

" I was very sorry to miss seeing you when I called 
last month. I am now in town but for a single day, 
and cannot devise a time for getting to you, but hope 
much another time to be more fortunate. Donne told 
me that I might send the accompanying little parcel 
for him to your house, and that there are packets 
passing between you and him which would give it an 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 175 

opportunity of being forwarded to Mattishall without 
expense. 

" Would you be inclined to have an article in your 
Review from Maurice on the present condition of 
Theology in England ? It would of course take in — 
indeed have main reference to — the great controver- 
sies now stirring. You know as well as I do the 
wisdom and value of all things coming from Maurice — ■ 
whether it would suit you is of course another matter 
into which I do not enter ; but if you think it would, 
his address is Guy's Hospital, otherwise you might 
say nothing about it." 

The above is an example of the system of friendly 
agency which prevailed amongst the " Apostles.'' 
It was a business quite unique in its way, and al- 
most incomprehensible ; for no doubt Kemble would 
have taken Maurice's work from Maurice, just as 
willingly as Moxon would have taken Tennyson's 
poems from Tennyson. 

Kemble and Donne (whose favourite study was 
history) seem sometimes to have relaxed their minds 
by sending each other full descriptions of the work 
they were engaged upon. These accounts, in lighter 
guise than the same material presented when 
given to the world, are of singular interest, and the 
following is a happy example of this sort of confi- 
dence : — 

" My dear Donne, — 

" I should have written to you long ago, but have 
been harassed out of all patience and activity by my 
wife's illness and other plagues, now happily abated. 



176 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

I am greatly flattered by your opinion of my Preface 
to Codex Diplomaticus : I confess I think it a satis- 
factory piece of work, and you will comprehend me 
when I say that it is pregnant with at least ten times 
what it expresses. You will also, I am sure, under- 
stand and appreciate the tone of decision and authority 
adopted in it, and which was assumed intentionally, 
and as it appears from its effects successfully : in that 
I did not choose to give the established humbugs even 
the chance of a doubtful expression. Grimm and 
the Germans are high in its praise, and I owe it another 
diploma or two, concerning which I care little enough. 
The least important part, viz. the upsetting all the old 
chronology, will of course attract most attention : 
but the nuts to crack, and the kernels to find, lie else- 
where. I send you another and lighter production : 
put it in your bookcase ; Schmeller's name is on it, 
but that signifies not. It is my last copy, and 
Schmeller may read it in the ArchcEologia, which you 
will not. You will think I have treated Magnusen and 
others harshly, but be content, they have only got 
their deserts, Magnusen being not only a Quack but a 
Rogue, that is a Quack conscious. James Grimm, who 
is not only the learnedest, but the gentlest of men, 
says I have served M. right. 

" I have made my cottage the prettiest thing in this 
part of the country, having built myself a whole wing, 
i.e. a dining-room, sixteen feet by eighteen, a hall with 
winding staircase, a good kitchen, one large bedroom 
sixteen feet square, two small spare rooms, and a 
nursery bedroom. I have also raised the roof of the 
old cottage. So now I keep a room for you, where I 
trust we shall have many a crack over the iniquities 
of mankind in general, and the virtues of ourselves 
and friends in particular. I wish I could persuade 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 177 

you to come and see us in September. You do not 
shoot, nor do I ; but we could find something to 
amuse us nevertheless, and now I have my books 
about me I am an emperor again. I do not propose 
to give you the rheumatism by putting you into a 
new room, for during the progress of building I rent a 
house a stone's throw from my own. Vipan spent a 
few days with me, and went away more than half 
persuaded to come home and settle in Surrey, which 
he says is the most livable part of England he has seen 
yet. Only my wife hinted that a mistress to a house 
was so necessary a piece of furniture as to be almost 
indispensable, whereupon Vipan flew off at a tangent 
and went to Baden. From that haunt of mad dogs 
and equally mad Englishmen he wrote to me a day 
or two ago, fairly charging my wife with frightening 
him out of England. Think of Connop Thirlwall 
being a real fuUgrown Bishop after all ! It is the most 
creditable thing Melbourne has yet done, and is likely 
to be a ' heavy blow,' etc., to that Goliath of Gath, 
Exeter Philpots. Melbourne set down a Commission 
to investigate Thirlwall' s Introduction to Schelier- 
macher, and smell out Heterodoxy. The Bishop of 
Chichester and Ripon, (?) who were charged with this 
role de Smell-fungus, having reported favourably, the 
Archbishop was asked if he had any objection. He 
hummed and hawed a good deal, but finding himself 
out-Bishoped, was fain to make the best face he could 
and gulped the pill. If one part of this transaction 
be better than another it is that the heads of 
our Spiritual Pastors and Masters have declared 
that to conduct Mythological Investigations after a 
scientific fashion is no longer Heresy. Vce, Vce 
Vohis P harts cei &c., &c. How are the parsons be- 

Bishoped ! ! ! Charles Fellows has discovered ten 

J?— (2318) 



178 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

new (or rather old) cities in Lycia : he has also found 
several bi-lingual Lycian inscriptions, furnishing us 
with a new language and a good deal of new History. 
Oxford Miiller has, in consequence, considerably 
modified his views respecting the Dorians. I should 
say that Philology on a large scale was rising rapidly 
in this costermonger age of ours. Thorpe has just 
published a noble book. The Anglo-Saxon Codes ; taken 
together with the Codex Diplomaticus, it will furnish 
the oldest, completest, and most thoroughly national 
Copus Juris of the whole Teutonic family. I am 
labouring in my vocation, that is getting on with my 
Anglo-Saxon Lexicon, which, if I complete my plan, 
will certainly be a book of some importance : but Ars 
longa, Vita brevis ! I aim at something rather more 
philosophical than the host of word-books, and I know 
that I cannot execute about a tithe of what I should 
like to do ; but then as yet no one else can, so I say 
Est quoddam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra ! In 
the philosophy of acting up to which doctrine I think 
you will fully concur with me, and so I commend you to 
God, &c. . . . When the root verb is not found yet, it 
will be given hypothetically in italics. What say 
you to this ? Exemp. gratia. Writan, wrat. writon. 
Writen, ccedere, sculpere, scrivere. Examples of the 
three uses. Deriv. Wret. (n) sculptura, and scabies ? 
Comp. For writan condemnare, &c. This will give 
you specimens of what I mean. Of course the de- 
rivatives and composites are numerous. You will 
see by the httle Abhandlung on the Runes, how writan 
came by its third signification. In old languages like 
Anglo-Saxon, the metaphorical uses of language have 
not overlaid the original system and vital vigour, and 
the metaphysics are readily comprehended. More- 
over, ' Language in its spontaneous period is sensuous,' 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 179 

which golden law write up in any Etymological Dic- 
tionary you possess. When a tongue becomes dead 
like the Enghsh of our own day, Society keeps the key 
of its coffin ! The errors which I shall commit will be 
innumerable, but still I think the experiment worth 
a trial, and as I said before, if I do not make it no one 
else will ; and who is to assure me that fifty years hence 
there will be any one more inclined or more capable 
than myself ? For unhappily Thorpe and myself are 
still almost alone in our work : many begin, but few 
finish ; and the mass of readers are not thinkers even 
tho' Anglo-Saxon be their subject. 

*' Miss Adelaide has been most triumphantly 
received at Naples, and my father, who still suffers, 
means to return with her early in 1841. Henry is 
in Galway, hourly expecting his Captain's Commis- 
sion. 

" Farewell, God bless you, and believe me, i 

" Yours ever affectionately, 

" John M. Kemble." 

While Maurice, who can have had little in common 
with his old friend Kemble, seemed glad to be able to 
secure him as a critic. 

" My Dear Kemble, — 

" I have been much disappointed in not catching you 
at home these two or three times that I have called. 

'^ I have fully intended to avail myself of your kind 
invitation to come at any time, several particular 
times, but at all these times have been prevented. 
However, I still hope that we may not find five and a 
half miles an absolutely impassable barrier to inter- 
course. 

" Either in your private or public capacity I shall 



i8o THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

have united to do myself the pleasure of asking your 
acceptance of this volume, but as my publishers 
regard you in the august and awful light of a Reviewer, 
I must no further interfere than to say that any 
words which you may find it impossible to say (in any 
note or parenthesis) in praise or abuse of what is here 
written, will be highly acceptable to them and received 
by me as an additional token of the kindness and 
friendship of which in former days I received so many 
proofs. 

" Fro , Believe me my dear Kemble, 
" Very sincerely yours, 

" F. Maurice." 

Through his father's influence Kemblewas appointed 
by the Lord Chamberlain, to succeed him in the office of 
Licenser of Plays, which post he held from 1840 and filled 
most capably, till his death in 1857 > t)ut from that 
period he lived most of his time at Addlestone, deep in 
old documents from which he would emerge sometimes 
to join in some such festivities as the following — 

*' Dear Brookfield, — 

*' How are your Bishop and your heart's cockles in- 
clined towards a run down into Hertfordshire on Friday 
next ? 

" Brief, it is the installation as Provincial Grand 
Master of William Stuart of Aldenham Abbey (son of 
the late Primate of Ireland) and a worthy brother in 
many more senses than the sense ' usual among 
Masons,' which is not always commonsense. 

" The place is Watford, one hour from London by 
Birmingham rail : the work magnificent, the dinner, 
for a province, comme il faut, the company excellent. 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE i8i 

If you will be my guest, I will ensure you a jolly 
evening and a hearty welcome. You can return early 
the next morning or late the same night, and you meet 
some of the best of our Surreyians and some of the 
first country gentlemen of Hertfordshire. 

" I am just returned from old Trinity, where I and 
Mrs. J. M. K. spent a fortnight. The old place is 
utterly gone to the dogs. Mr. W. — is more intolerable 
than anything that has ever been reported of him : I 
never saw so melancholy and mischievous a spectacle. 
As for the young 'uns they are a set of milksops. Con- 
ceive my being absolutely told that men did not 
believe that I used to get out under the Library thro' 
the bars ! As if I was the only man who could take a 
flying jump through them, armed cap-and-gown, in 
our time. They treated it as a myth. I got them up 
three combination rooms while there — small ones ! — 
and was thanked : they had not had such luck for 
months. I made delicate inquiries about milk-punch : 
the receipt it seems is lost, but it was suggested that 
milk and water abounded — if that would do as well. 
Tho' a member of many scientific associations, I thought 
the experiment too venturous. In short, there is but 
one expressive word for the whole race, which I leave 
to your own discreet imagination to supply. It is a 
great pity. One wants men to cultivate something 
more than flowers : unhappily at present Mr. Widiall 
with his geraniums drives a better trade than Mr. 
Hardman used with other commodities. Some indeed 
of the old set — rari nantes in gtirgite vasto — console 
themselves with solitary smoke ; and gave me some 
capital dinners. But they seemed half afraid of 
their own hospitality. Can you imagine the re-appear- 
ance of the sweating sickness, or the great fire of 
London ? How these things would astonish us ! Well, 



i82 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

don't go down to Cambridge, or you certainly will ' go 
home ' before ' morning ' from any undergraduate's 
party you may honour with your presence. If the 
fellows were only manly thereby, I should honour 
them, but I hardly saw a broad shouldered chap in 
the place. It was full of well-dressed, decorous 
mediocrity without great virtue and, I dare say, with- 
out great vice. But milksops ! milksops ! Eheu ! ! ! 
Of course such real sound hearts as Merivale, Thomp- 
son and Co. are exceptions : but they belong to us — 
not to the later dynasty ! Sedgwick growled awfully 
and let out his full heart to me in one or two walks on 
the Trumpington and Huntingdon roads, and Romilly 
sneezed in a gentlemanly way, as he used. But I 
asked of echo, where were Thirlwall, Greenwood, jolly 
old ; Musgrave, good old Peacock, Fisher, Barnes ? — 
even poor Hyman — and echo answered ' Where ? ' — 
it is quite right they should be — some Bishops, others 
Deans ! But they are not at Trinity ! " 



Evidently there was in those days as there is in 
later times the same resentment by old Cantabrigians 
at the intrusion of a later generation upon their former 
haunts which they look upon as private property, 
and a consequent scorn and contempt for the usurpers. 

And in another letter he says to Brookfield — 

" Dear Parson, — 

''Last year you had sinners to save, and sinners to 
damn on the part of your Bishop. By Thursday in 
Easter week, this year, I hope such clerical employ- 
ments will be over, and that you will be able to come 
down to me on the 20th April (i.e. Thursday) to stay 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 183 

or go, as you please. Did I tell you that I could give 
you a bed ? If not, smite me on the orthodox cheek ! 

" But if you can come earlier and will bring Mrs. 
Brookfield with you, she and the other widows on 
this awful occasion can make common cause, and 
when we dine in Lodge, they can dine in company 
chez noi and rail at us. We shall meet for Chapter 
early in the day ; for Lodge about three ; for dinner at 
six, or half -past five. I can lend you a badge, and you 
will want no more masonry than your own good feel- 
ing. You will meet gentlemen, good men, good masons, 
and joUy good fellows. Need I say more ? 

*' Certainly : Mrs. John Kemble, a lady whom I 
once had the honour to introduce to you, had a great 
desire not only to renew her acquaintance with you, 
but to welcome your wife ; and will be most happy if 
you can manage to spend a few days here and breathe 
a little of God's air, which never blows in London. 
You may go to your duty ; why should not Mrs. 
Brookfield stay here for a few days for her pleasure ? 
A country gentleman's house is always open. On 
looking over my scrawl I perceive that the Calli- 
graphists would be puzzled, but I also have to add 
that between the Queen and the British and Foreign and 
the N. W. Provl. Grand Master of Surrey, I have 
written this day exactly three hundred and sixty five 
letters, all of six foolscap sheets, and my hand is 
becoming a humbug. So leaving you to decide when 
and how you will come (only let me know a day before, 
that I may fetch you and baggage from Weybridge). 
We shall mingle dignity with gravity, seriis jocum, as 
becomes us, we are the jokers, you the serious. Will 
you come ? 

I remain (in ample form) 

" Yours fraternally, 

" John M. Kemble." 



i84 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Concerning the installing of the Prince Consort as 
Chancellor of Cambridge^ he wrote — 

" Dear W. H. B.— 

" You would very greatly oblige a poor man, who is 
sometimes stumpt, as the saying is, for a song, by 
sending him one of yours ; and in truth, you made me 
a sort of promise of ' Cannikin ' . I do not ask for 
more than the usufruct, saving all rights of the superior 
lord and owner of the same, whenever he shall think 
fit to resume his proprietorship. I am become a kind 
of amphibious animal, rejoicing by turns in the mud of 
London, and the mists of Addlestone ; on the latter I 
can fatten like wood-cocks ; but I know nothing that 
typifies the effects of the former save swine — eels 
perhaps. So on the whole, if you please, let it be 
understood that when in London I am, and am to be 
considered, a Pig. Can we tempt you out to brown and 
red tines, falling leaves and a smell of fungus — ' odours 
vague that haunt the year's decay ' as a dim lushy, 
smokified poet singeth ? 

" Will the loving-cup of the Lodge of St. George, 
Chertsey, tempt you out of residence for a few hours ? 
It will be circulating with tolerable rapidity about 
nine o'clock on Thursday, November i6th, under the 
auspices of your poor friend and most unworthy W. M. 
Finally, is there anything in Autumn, Masonry or 
Addlestone that will make you pitch your Bishop and 
cure of souls to ApoUyon for a season ? Is not your 
pulpit cold, your vestry paved with stone, your church 
too little (or too much) heated ? Have you not a 
catarrhal affection for which Addlestone is a specific, 
Chapelfields an undoubted cure ? Is there not balm 
in Gilead ? Is there not wine in the bottle ? Is there not 
a bed in the spare room, and a coach and several trains 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 185 

in the morning ? I pause for a reply. James Sped- 
ding seems muddy too : he writes from Mire-hall or 
Mirehouse or some such other boggy mansion in Cum- 
berland ; he talks of returning to town to continue 
his researches at the British Museum — very muddy 
this, indeed ! All the rest of the world is so swamped 
in mud that one never even hears of it. In the midst 
of dull plays, refractory Managers, fastidious Lord 
Chamberlains and slippery diplomatic doings at home 
and abroad, I feel a yearning after a good draught out 
of old Cambridge times, to clear my head and give 
a fillip to my heart in jthese cur-days of ours. So 
Lonsdale is to be the new Bishop ? What will 
Whewell say ? It is supposed he did say — ' Madam, 
I don't mean to hint anything about a remuneration 
or a gratification for all the bother you've given us 
here : but I think it right to say that these are very 
hard times, and Mrs. Whewell and I forsee that we shall 
have a very large family, and I've been at a great 
deal of trouble for you and the Prince, and as I said 
before I don't mean to ask for anything, but if you're 
inclined to do the thing handsomely, there's a bishop- 
rick and one or two deaneries vacant, and . . . 

" The answer is not on record, but though Trench, 
Winter, and Lonsdale were all named, I looked in vain 
for the euphonious nomenclature of Dr. William W — ! 

" Can you imagine a man reduced to write all this 
trash, merely by way of varying the amusement of 
looking at the rain on the leads, from a back third 
pair in Bruton Street ? So it is, and villainously 
dull, to say nothing of being dressed like a gentleman 
for fear of the sudden intrusion of a Manager. Pity 
me. Pity me : if this lasts long I shall take to writing 
domestic tragedies in the syncretic manner, which is 
the last stage of mud and dullness. 



i86 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

" Make my kind remembrances to the partner of 
your joys and sorrows^ and believe me, 

" Yours very Fraternally, Masonically, 
" Apostolically, Diabolically, 

" John M. Kemble." 

Of Kemble' s life-work, there is but one opinion. Of 
Anglo-Saxon he knew more than any other student of 
his time, for he had as well as their information a 
scientific knowledge of his subject. He took infinite 
pains with his work and his accuracy was so absolute 
that all that he passed as genuine was accepted without 
question or doubt. As a specimen of the style of the 
English of his writings — a few lines from his valuable 
treatise on the " Supposed Antiquity of Church 
Rates " will suffice — 

" The first person who brought Christianity into this 
country as a missionary from Pope Gregory of Rome, 
was St. Augustine : he found the people of England 
worshipping Woden and Thunor and other Gods, and 
he succeeded in converting a great number of the men 
of Kent from heathenism. . . . We have still the 
letters which Pope Gregory sent to St. Augustine and 
not only from them get wisdom and piety, but from 
the rules of conduct which they laid down, these 
letters were held in affectionate estimation by the 
primitive English Christians." etc. 

He had too much of the student in him to fight for 
the conventions : and as time went on absorbed himself 
more and more into his study. " A brilliant scholar, 
given over to his own learning and deep philosophiz- 
ing," as his sister said, he never competed with the 



JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE 187 

world, but steadily got through much useful work, 

work which was admired by German and English 

savants alike. He was only fifty when he died. 

He was unduly modest with regard to his poetic gifts 

although they were highly esteemed by his fellow 

*' apostles." The following sonnet was one of their 

favourites : 

Might, majesty and wisdom were the dower 
That man inherited : why has he striven 
To cast away the panoply of Heaven, 
Wilfully crouching in the world's dark power ? 
Faith, care and watchfulness were as a tower 
From which he might o'erlook the whirling wave 
Of hopes and fears ; a rock of might to save 
The shipwrecked mariner in evil hour ; 
And these he hath disdained. Woe is me 
That, God-endowed, he yet should bear to creep 
Along with noisome creatures of the deep, 
Sharing the boisterous unrest of the sea. 
Till tumult is his nature, and his life 
Is as the billows, dashing hate and strife. 



CHAPTER IX 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 



Enough for us if any praise. 
And you above the rest, 
The humours of a solemn phrase 
The wisdom of a jest 

(Joint Compositions) 

Shadows of three dead men 
Walk'd in the walks with me, 
Shadows of three dead men, and thou 
wast one of the three. 

(Tennyson) 

Henry Lushington was the youngest of this set of 
" Apostles." Like most of them, he had gained 
scholastic distinction at an unusually early age. He 
came from Charterhouse, where he had been head of 
the school at fifteen years old and where he had laid 
the foundations of lifelong friendships with Thack- 
eray and Venables. He was only seventeen when he 
came up to Cambridge in 1829, and he immediately 
made a favourable impression, not only by his sweet- 
ness of disposition and personal charm but also by his 
singularly attractive appearance. It is a remarkable 
fact that all these intellectual giants were endowed, 
not only with prodigious faculties, but with extra- 
ordinary good looks. And the cleverest appear also 
to have been the handsomest. 

188 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 189 

At the end of his third term, Lushington had proved 
himself, in College examinations and in all that he 
undertook, so far ahead of all the men of his year that 
it was confidently anticipated that the highest honours 
awaited him. Unfortunately, his health became deli- 
cate and he was urged to take a little relaxation. This 
he was loth to do and he continued to struggle on with 
his studies in the face of all warnings — until he was 
finally overcome by an illness which necessitated his 
leaving Cambridge for two whole years. This was at 
a period when the " Apostles " were at their brightest 
and best ; and Lushington's grief at having to tear 
himself from the joyous companionship of these, his 
dearest friends, was more than all their sympathy could 
assuage. It was almost as sad for him to return in 
1832 to find the old radiant circle broken up — most of 
its lights already gone down, and others about to go. 

The year of his return, and again the following 
year, he took the Porson Prize for Greek Iambics. In 
1834 he graduated as Senior Optime with a first class 
in the Classical Tripos. In 1836 he was elected Fellow 
of Trinity. And he achieved all these honours with no 
special effort — for he was too much of an invalid, even 
after his two years of complete rest, to " cram " or 
study at the extra pressure which most young men 
apply on the eve of an important examination. 

He first displayed his great faculty for composition 
in essays written for the*' Society " — his methods were 
different to those of most of the " Apostles," but these 
notwithstanding held him in high esteem and reckoned 



igo THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

him a remarkable writer and fluent speaker. Francis 
Garden once wrote about Henry's brother and incident- 
ally about Henry himself , '' The^' Apostles ' are flourish- 
ing in fine style — I had the pleasure of begetting one 
the other day in the person of the younger Lushington 
(brother to the senior medallist of the year before this). 
He is a glorious fellow, and I feel great pleasure in 
thinking that what in all probability has been my last 
*' Apostolic ' act should have been to introduce so 
excellent an acquisition to our forces." 

During the last part of his College career, Henry 
Lushington brought out a spirited pamphlet upon 
Fellow Commoners and Honorary Degrees — a fine 
pronouncement against '' an unwarrantable and un- 
justifiable institution." Venables says, that ''his 
common sense and his pride as a gentleman were 
revolted by the spectacle of noblemen and cadets of 
nobility attired in a gorgeous livery, courted by their 
academic superiors, and taught to regard, perhaps 
not without reason, a curtailment of their studies as 
a reward due to their hereditary merit." This was 
his first printed work ; it was widely read and made 
a considerable impression although the institution he 
inveighed against as utterly inconsistent with the 
liberty and equality of University life, was not entirely 
abolished till many years later. In 1837 he left 
Cambridge and entered himself at the Inner Temple, 
and was called to the Bar in 1840 ; but he scarcely 
ever practised. 

It is impossible to conjecture to what academic 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 191 

heights Lushington might not have soared, had he 
not been trammelled all his life by ill-health. He could 
not lead the life he would have loved, that of a busy 
student, active in the acquisition of fresh knowledge and 
liberal in its diffusion ; he could only contemplate the 
industry of others and exercise his delicate literary 
discrimination in courteous criticism and generous 
appreciation. 

Lushington' s greatest intimate was undoubtedly 
Venables ; next in his affections came probably Tenny- 
son, whose aching heart found in this warm friendship 
some solace in its mourning for his lost beloved com- 
■ panion — 

Two dead men have I known 
In courtesy like to thee : 
Two dead men have I loved 
With a love that will ever be : 

These two dead men were Arthur Hallam and Henry 
Lushington, and the charm of this later friend was, in 
the poet's eyes, enhanced by his exquisite taste in 
poetry. Tennyson admired his criticisms so much 
that he used to say '' that of all the critics with whom 
he had discussed his own poems Henry Lushington 
was the most suggestive." For one of the most 
attractive traits in Tennyson's character was the 
naive simplicity with which, when at work, he would 
collect suggestions from all his friends. *' The Prin- 
cess " was dedicated to Lushington, and his home, 
with its " broad lawns " is described by the poet in 
the prologue to that poem. 



192 THE CAMBRIDGE ^'APOSTLES" 

The connexion between the Lushingtons and the 
Tennysons was very close. Park House, near Maid- 
stone, contained a charming group of bright young 
people, four sisters and three brothers, all of whom 
loved to welcome the poet and his relations to that 
home, where 

higher on the walls 
Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer 
Their own forefathers' arms and armour hung. 

And although at that time the Tractarian move- 
ment was agitating the great minds all over the 
country and stormy discussion disturbed almost 
every intellectual gathering, it is noteworthy that 
with the gay and spiritual circle assembled round the 
Lushingtons' table, the talk was all of poetry and 
literature and of their youthful exploits. As Tenny- 
son says : 

" but we unworthies told 
Of College : he had climbed across the spikes, 
And he had squeezed himself betwixt the bars, 
And he had breezed the Proctor's dogs : and one 
Discuss' d his tutor, rough to common men 
But honeying at the whisper of a lord ; 
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain 
Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory." 

Edmund Lushington, Henry's elder brother (after- 
wards Professor of Greek at Glasgow), one of the 
most remarkable students of his day and to whose 
brilliant scholarship Thackeray makes allusion in 
The Virginians, by -and -by married the sister of 
the poet, Cecilia Tennyson. The epithalamium at 
the end of the In Memoriam is in celebration of 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 193 

this event and not, as commonly supposed, to com- 
memorate the marriage of the lady formerly betrothed 
to Arthur Hallam. 

Lushington's essays are all elegant in form and 
solid in matter ; in those which concern Italy 
there is perhaps an added vigour and enthusiasm, 
while his Italian translations give a happy and inge- 
nious reproduction of the Italian characteristics of the 
originals. He sympathized with the revolutionary 
poet Giusti, a contemporary of the " Apostles," who 
wrote, amongst other things, his " Memorie di Pisa," in 
which he incorporated his reminiscences of College days. 
In an appreciation of this poet and these especial 
poems, Lushington says : " There is a deep truth and 
tenderness in the tone in which Giusti recalls those 
four happy years spent without care ; the days, the 
nights, ' smoked away ' in free gladness, in laughter, 
in uninterrupted talk ; the aspirations, the free, open- 
hearted converse, all the delights of that life, whether 
at Cambridge or at Pisa, which comes not again." 

If in his literary habits he was rather the reverse of 

orderly, his intellect — Venablessays — " was thoroughly 

scholarlike, even mathematical in its accuracy, and 

promiscuous knowledge at once arranged itself into 

symmetrical form in his unfailing memory." His 

retention was amazing — he knew Carlyle's French 

Revolution by heart, and it was supposed — both in 

the Lushington as well as in the Tennyson family, that 

if " Alfred's " writings had, every vestige of them, been 

destroyed, they could have been accurately repro- 
13— (2318) 



194 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

duced whole, without the alteration of a word, from 
that marvellous garner. Tennyson himself said of 
him : " Others may find a fault in a poem, but Harry 
finds the fault and tells you how to mend it." 

Of the '* Joint Compositions " produced by Lush- 
ington and Venables, it is hardly possible to distin- 
guish which sentiment or which thought belongs to 
each. There was such a perfect accord between these 
two men that they practically thought alike. The 
poems were made as they walked or rode together — 
and they were " contented with our own appreciation 
of their correspondence with our own purpose." 

The following is a fair specimen of their work. 

But doubtful in our dazzling prime, 
We watched the struggle of the time, 

The war of new and old ; 
We loved the past with Tory love, 
Yet more than Radicals we strove 
|y For coming years of gold 

When rich and poor in mutual trust 
Shall know each other and be just. 

Not bound by laws severe : 
And a true mother commonwealth 
Lead back sick children unto health 

With love and gentle fear. 

Lushington was one of those who watched events ; 
he did not meddle with them, and he never let them 
agitate him unless they were likely to become a menace 
to the country ; but being by family ties and affection 
connected with Indian affairs, he, over the retreat 
from Cabul 1841-2, allowed his anxiety and distress 
seriously to affect his health. He afterwards investi- 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 195 

gated the matter, and became convinced that all had 
been brought about under instructions from home, 
and that those who followed out that foohsh and 
flagitious policy did so because they could not recede 
from it. This decision caused him to produce a book 
called a Great Country's Little Wars, which work was 
unfortunately printed too late to do him or Indian 
affairs any good ; but anyone interested in Afghanistan 
to-day could scarcely do better than study that eloquent 
and engrossing brochure. It was supposed to have been 
the wisest and wittiest pamphlet ever written on the 
Indian Adminstration System . Of the Indian Service he 
ever wrote in glowing sanguine terms ; he applauded 
the men who worked there and encouraged them 
and praised them as much for the steady work which 
did not appear as for brilliant work which advertised 
itself to all the world. When his brother, an Indian 
judge, paid him a visit once, he said : " I at first 
thought he looked very old, having the recollection of 
thirteen years back wherewith to contrast him. Prob- 
ably if one could place in the glass, side by side with 
one's own belathered face of to-morrow morning, the 
comparatively smooth and youthful cheeks of 1831, 

one should see at least an equal change ; but it is well 

well under the circumstances of the case, that is 

that the spectre of one's own youth does not walk 
through life by one's side. It would be an appro- 
priate antithesis to the skeleton of the Egyptians, a 
memento equally effective and not less painful. The 
two together, one on each side of one's present self, 



196 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

would visibly complete the Trinity of Time, ' quod 
fuit, est, et erit, the trinodas necessitas ' which includes 
us all." 

He took an eager interest in every subject, and even 
brought to the question of the gauges (one which 
much agitated our grandfathers), the freshness of an 
original mind. Milnes said of this : " His pamphlet 
on the Broad Railway gauge is a powerful argument, 
and as amusing to the unprofessional reader as 
was Bishop Berkeley's ' Essays on Tar-water ' to the 
general public of his time." 

He had in politics a leaning towards Liberal, even 
Radical, opinions ; he enthusiastically welcomed the 
accomplishment of Catholic Emancipation ; he ap- 
plauded the French Revolution of 1830 ; and he 
approved of the Reform Bill and voted for the grant to 
Maynooth. In his political leanings the opinions of 
all the *' Apostles " stand revealed — they seem to 
have been at one over all these questions — though 
some of them in addition espoused the vexed cause of 
Women's Suffrage. 

At the time when the Maynooth Endowment Bill 
was the question of the day, a number of the members 
of the Senate of Cambridge signed a petition against 
the Bill ; on which Lushington organized a counter 
memorial in its favour. On his paper in a few days 
he had six hundred signatures, including all the people 
of eminence in Cambridge. In company with some other 
promoters he presented this imposing scroll in Downing 
Street, on which occasion — more to his amusement 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 197 

than amazement — Goldburn, the member for Cam- 
bridge, either wilfully or stupidly took the petition in 
an entirely opposite light to that desired ; and choos- 
ing to infer that the deputation were his own political 
supporters and entirely indifferent to the endowment 
of Maynooth, said to them : " You will be glad to 
hear, Gentlemen, that our friends on the other side 
are not seriously hostile. They take it up only as a 
matter of principle /" 

In 1846, he was appointed Chief Secretary of the 
Government of Malta ; this change of scene altered 
his purely negative life into an active one. Once at 
his post, his administrative powers were found to be 
remarkably high, yet he continued in the midst of 
his duties to exercise his fine poetic and critical 
powers. A patriot, as well as a polished writer of 
verse, he found his best expression in what may be 
termed Battle pieces — ^in " The Road to the Trenches," 
a poem of singularly pathetic beauty, he says — 

O'er his features, as he hes, 

Calms the wrench of pain : 

Close, faint eyes ; pass, cruel skies ! 

Freezing mountain plain. 

With far-off sounds the stillness teems ; 

Church-bells, — voices low. 

Passing into English dreams 

There amid the snow, 
And darkening, thickening o'er the heights 
Down fell the snow. 

Looking, looking for the mark, 
Down the others came. 
Struggling through the snowdrifts stark. 
Calling out his name : 



198 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

" Here, or there ? " the drifts are deep : 

" Have we passed him ? " No ! 

Look, a Httle growing heap. 

Snow above the snow. 
Where heavy on his heavy sleep 
Down fell the snow. 

Simply done his soldier's part 

Through long months of woe. 

All endured with soldier's heart. 

Battle, famine, snow : 
Noble, nameless English heart, 
Snow-cold, in snow. 

He used to say that his " was a generation which grew 
up with some hopes of the progress of men : some faith in 
their country." Someone once asked why Lushington 
had not kept to the law, or done better at it, when 
Milnes said : " Perhaps he paid what appears to be 
the inevitable penalty of humorous men in their 
relations to pubHc life — that of seeming unsteadfast 
to the narrow-minded, and insincere to the stupid." 
And Milnes said this in all sincerity, for he himself 
had been doubted on account of his humour, as 
had been more than one of them in those earnest 
days. 

On behalf of the Italians Lushington always 
laboured with generous affection. His home in Malta 
was one of the most popular resorts in the island, 
and he was highly esteemed and beloved. He retained 
all his life the fragile grace which distinguished him 
as well as his beautiful countenance. Venables thinks 
he preserved the latter because it had "never been 
distorted by a bitter feeling, and never deformed by a 



HENRY LUSHINGTON 199 

mean or grovelling impulse." Milnes said that of all the 
people of his youth, with the exception of Arthur 
Hallam, Henry Lushington rested clearest in his 
memory. 

He had a restful disposition and rare and varied 
gifts, and Tennyson had a true affection [for him — he 
was for the poet one of his " Princes of Courtesy," but 
Tennyson was not with him when he died in 1855. It 
was Venables who undertook that memorable and 
melancholy pilgrimage, who brought his dying friend 
step by step from Aries to Paris. 

" At Dijon," he says, '' I at his request read him a 
considerable number of the Odes from a mutilated 
copy of Horace which was the only edition procurable 
in the shops of Lyons. As often as I paused at one 
of the frequent breaks of continuity, he repeated the 
missing passage in a low voice, without the mistake of 
a word." At Paris, at the last, when Venables read to 
him, from an unpublished copy which he had brought 
from England with him, Tennyson's " Daisy " and his 
poem to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Lushington said, 
" How the simple change in the last line from a dactyl 
to an amphibrachys changes a mere experiment into 
a discovery in metre ! " The verses remarked upon 
being — 

Rev, F. D. Maurice 

You'll have no scandal while you dine, 
But honest talk and wholesome wine, 
And only hear the magpie gossip 
Garrulous under a roof of pine. 



200 THE CAMBRIDGE ^^ APOSTLES " 

The Daisy. 

Or tower, or high hill- convent seen 
A light amid its olives green, 
Or olive hoary cape in ocean, 
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine. 

Milnes was at Meurice's in Paris at the time Lush- 
ington and Venables arrived there and he says: 
" You may think how shocked I was at finding dear 
Henry Lushington so ill that there is little hope of his 
life. He came from Malta some days ago with his 
physician, and it seems doubtful whether he can move 
home, which he is anxious to do. — Poor Venables is 
with him, tending him like a lover, and carr3dng him 
about in his arms. His elder brother arrived yester- 
day. All this blackens this bright sky and makes a 
visit here very gloomy." Then again : "Dear Henry is 
worse and worse and there is hardly a gleam of hope." 
. . . And again : '^ Henry Lushington is no better, they 
do not let me see him and probably I never shall again. 
I somehow or other think of those who are left rather 
than those who are going, and thus I feel more for Ven- 
ables than for himself. It has been the best and truest 
friendship I have ever seen in life." 

The phrase which best expressed Venables' feelings 
over this great loss was, he says, the old familar words : 
Quanta pluris tui meminisse quam inter alios versari. 



CHAPTER X 

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 

Angels have talked with him and showed him thrones ; 
Ye knew him not : he was not one of ye ; 
Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn : 
Ye could not see the marvel in his eye 
The still serene abstraction. 



(Tennyson.) 



For, being of that honest few, 
Who give the Fiend himself his due, 
Should eighty-thousand college-councils 
Thunder " Anathema " friend at you : 

Should all our churchmen foam in spite 
At you, so careful of the right. 
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome 
{Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight. 



(Jhid.) 



A PROFOUND thinker, a hard worker, a man of con- 
science and of scruples ; one who sought all his life 
through for truth in order to reveal it to others grop- 
ing in the same search ; a rare personality, of ascetic 
charm and philosophic culture ; a teacher who founded 
a school and attracted a multitude ; the influence of 
Frederick Denison Maurice has scarcely lasted in the 
way it promised nor in the way it was expected to do. 
It may, however, be too soon to decide conclusively 



202 THE CAMBRIDGE " APOSTLES " 

on this point ; those who feel his hght has grown a 
httle dim, all hope that with the swing of time its glow 
may again be blown into flame ; and if in the days to 
come the work which he accomplished — apart from 
the educational schemes which he evolved, which 
have had as full and ample achievement as he himself 
could have wished — if in the future his teaching and 
writings are not valued so highly as they used to be 
for their intrinsic worth, their literary merit and their 
conscientious research, still those who go to him 
must be favourably impressed by his strength, his 
purpose and his loftiness of aim. 

Maurice, in common with many of the highest 
intellects of the early part of the nineteenth century, 
was born of Unitarian parents; an accident which 
coloured his character and caused many of his struggles; 
it certainly prevented him from accepting life with the 
content and assurance that others, educated on 
broader lines, possessed. The passing of most of his 
family at different times into different religious com- 
munities, also complicated his threads of thought and 
placed him at an early impressionable age in the tur- 
moil of theological war. These early mental perturb- 
ations affected his self-confidence in later life and made 
him doubtful of the soundness of the conclusions at 
which he arrived even after profound study and 
mature consideration. The hyper-humility, which was 
part of his most intimate nature, went hand in hand 
with an inward and secret sensitiveness. He admitted 
himself that '' he never thought his own arrangement 




Fridrn'ck Diiiisoii Maurice 

From the portrait by Sauiiiel Laurence 
Photographed by Emery Walker 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 203 

of himself satisfactory," and in his searchings after 
truth, he no sooner adopted a fresh view than he would 
begin to reconsider with regret the theory he had just 
discarded. 

Had Frederick Maurice been only more sure of him- 
self and his own position, his influence would have been 
considerably more great and more lasting than it was, 
and his prophetic instinct of more unchallengeable 
value. 

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 
year 1823, being then eighteen, and he went there 
from a circle who imagined that the system at that 
University might have the effect of narrowing a mind 
which had already proclaimed itself to be no ordinary 
one. But whatever may be alleged against Cambridge, 
her influence has never been what could be described 
as '* narrowing." Upon Maurice his University life 
had as broadening an effect as it had upon his com- 
panions Trench, Buller and Blakesley and on those 
who presently joined him there, Arthur Hallam, 
Tennyson and Milnes — the broadening process not 
being, in every case, equally fruitful of good. 

At Cambridge he at once set about forming fresh 
aims in divers directions. Every new day, every new 
work, every new conversation, made a deep impres- 
sion on the shy and emotional youth. " The more 
brilliant but less profound " John Sterling sought him 
out, insisted on having his friendship, and entered 
with him into an intellectual alliance which not only 
gave pleasure to themselves but to all who knew 



204 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

them. For years these two were close companions. 
Sterling exerting himself always for Maurice's wel- 
fare in every way, but most of all in endeavouring to 
make him '' come out of himself." Each of them, 
strong in spirit, influenced the other more than he 
knew, and hardly aware of his own work, helped to 
form the other'' s character. 

Maurice had even then the penetrating individuality 
of the master mind ; a power which at once and in all 
circles made itself felt. Through Sterling's instru- 
mentality he was initiated into the company of the 
" Apostles." Treated with unwonted respect by his 
contemporaries, he became the acknowledged leader of 
these remarkable men, who, as soon as he began to 
formulate his thoughts, showed themselves ready to 
accept from him whatever he had to give. 

His metaphysical powers were remarkably great; 
though — despite his worship of his friend — Sterling 
would only allow that '' Maurice had in him the 
makings of a metaphysician." 

However, study was easy to Maurice, and he did 
well ; but if he had not felt his position as a Dissenter 
to be somewhat anomalous, he would for certain have 
done better. It was with him always the " test " 
question, or the relative position of man to God, or 
Unitarianism as opposed to the doctrines of the 
Church of England, which troubled him. 

Maurice was no sooner an ** Apostle " than he set 
to work to reorganize the " Society " and to make in 
it drastic and sweeping reforms. Finding it limp 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 205 

after too rapid a growth, he imbued it with new 
strength, turned its aspirations towards higher objects, 
showed it its own power and caused it to be univer- 
sally recognized as the most remarkable and interest- 
ing Society of the first half of the nineteenth century. 

He fired his fellows with new ardour ; they warmed 
to the work which he inspired, and gradually Maurice 
himself began to draw fervour from the burning dis- 
cussions which he had kindled. Filled with the glow 
of a new self-confidence, he shone forth and dazzled 
all with a brilliancy which had too long been kept 
under a bushel. It would be useless to pretend that 
the opinions which then, or even a little later on, took 
the strongest hold on the " Apostles " were always 
sound and well balanced. The abstruseness of the topic 
chosen, and the unquestioning confidence they reposed 
in their favourite advocate of it, had often an unset- 
tling effect upon " changing youth," though perhaps 
the unsettledness of mind of the *' Apostles" at that 
time, should only be reckoned as part of a phase 
through which the whole educated world was then 
struggHng. 

In 1825 Maurice became part editor of the Metro- 
politan Quarterly, a review which only ran into four 
numbers, but which affords interesting evidence of 
the high and polished literary attainments, even in 
those early days, of Maurice and his college friends. 
It was an excellent Review, admirably conducted, and 
its failure seems quite unaccountable. 

Its collapse was a heavy blow to Maurice, who 



2o6 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

had privately thought it might have been the first 
step in a hterary career. Most of the " Apostles," full 
of expectation and hope in his future, were for his 
joining the Church and taking orders. John Kemble 
indeed vowed he should " one day be his curate," but 
Maurice could not then see his way to such a course. 
He turned his thoughts to the bar, and in 1827 migrated 
to Trinity Hall, in order to pursue his law studies 
there ; and thither John Sterling soon afterwards 
followed him. 

Maurice and Sterling, who took themselves even 
more seriously than did the other Apostles of their 
time, were ambitious to achieve more than they, 
— more indeed than was humanly possible. In their 
keenness to peer beyond the horizon of Philosophy 
— farther than the range of intellectual vision — inter- 
jacent facts faded out of their focus, and truths which 
to less eager eyes stood forth clear-cut and defined, 
became to their strained vision blurred and indistinct. 
They were clever enough to know in their hearts that 
they had overtaxed their powers, but, in the pride of 
youth, they were loth to admit it. It was probably 
this failure which gave them the sadness of expression 
which distinguished them both. 

Maurice always acknowledged that he was under 
the greatest of obligations to Sterling. He practically 
lived with him at Cambridge. He always spoke and 
thought of his friend reverently and affectionately. 
" Sterling," said he, " fancied all fine things of me 
because I had exactly the qualities he wanted, and 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 207 

was deficient in those which he had," and of a later 
time he says: *' When this opinion was shaken, when 
he (Sterhng) suspected I had passed into a fanatical 
theologian, and when I was hard and cold to him, he 
still showed me the rarest friendship." While Ster- 
ling said of Maurice : " With his frankness and noble- 
ness which always exaggerated his debts to others he 
immensely overrated what he owed to me and suffered 
the inevitable disappointment which follows when a 
supposed hero turns out to be what he is." 

Maurice in due course took a first class in civil law, 
to the exultation of his ApostoUc friends, who urged 
him now to take his B.C.L.,and influenced him so that 
he wrote to ask what " degree of consent and adher- 
ence to the doctrines and formulas of the Church of 
England he would have to profess, in order to obtain 
admission to the degree." He was told the profes- 
sion of Conformity which would be exacted from 
him, on which he immediately requested that his 
name might be taken from the books. " He was con- 
vinced that he could never conscientiously fulfil these 
requirements," — that is to say, allegiance to and 
observance of the canons of the Established Church. 
As his intellectual value was so highly esteemed, the 
importance of taking a degree was pressed upon 
him, whereon he wrote imperatively and begged that 
his name might be removed at once. " Whatever his 
religious convictions might ultimately become he would 
not hang a bridle round his neck to lead his con- 
science." His father, used by this time to change of 



2o8 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

thought in his children, was deHghted that his son had 
" preserved his principles at the sacrifice of his inter- 
ests," and joyfully upheld him in his decision. 

Maurice's life and acts at this period are worthy of 
all praise, particularly as there is no doubt that from 
his character, conduct and success, he would have 
received a Fellowship had he made that his object; 
but he turned his back upon the temptation and 
entered seriously upon a literary life. 

All this time, however, although he hesitated to 
admit it, his sympathy with the Church was growing 
in strength, especially as the influence over him of the 
German Philosophers — to which he and his compan- 
ions had all submitted for a period — was sensibly 
weakening. Throughout his theological researches, 
Maurice stoutly maintained he had no desire for 
religious excitement — ^but it is sure that few men ever 
lived in a greater whirl of it than he. A trifling 
quibble, a tiny scruple, would suffice to set his mind in 
a ferment. He was unable, at this period, to contem- 
plate calmly the science of Theology. He lived perpet- 
ually in that very state of " religious excitement " 
which he professed and believed himself to disregard. 

He, however, found peacefulness and rest in his 
friendships, which were many, strong and varied. 
He was as firmly attached to Kemble — gay, debon- 
naire and sincere — as he was to the brilliant and 
speculative Sterhng. Kemble, in his loyal affection, 
followed Maurice and Sterling for a certain distance in 
one of their wanderings through theological mazes, and 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 209 

wrote, when he had safely emerged and Maurice already 
saw his way out : " Maurice has determined to put his 
shoulder also to the wheel, and to stand up in these later 
days as one of the watchmen and defenders. He has de- 
clared for the Church. . . . If he only remains what 
I have known him to be, the Church will rarely have 
possessed a braver or a more protecting champion. He 
is a man of war in the panoply of intellect and will." 

Maurice left Cambridge sadly and wistfully, feehng 
he had not fulfilled his part there ; but while he deplored 
Cambridge levity of tone and Cambridge slang, he 
spoke with enthusiasm of Cambridge affectionateness 
and Cambridge generosity. Of himself he says, look- 
ing back on those times and speaking of his position 
among the "Apostles" and other societies where he was 
wont to sway the majority: " I was a noisy and often 
angry disputant — though mixing much shyness with 
my presumption. In most parties I was reckoned a 
bore." 

His work during his career as a reviewer shows 
the greatest ability and the widest range of thought, 
but he did not really shine as a journahst. To begin 
with, he was not happy. He did not like London ; his 
life there was all struggle, and a want of success in his 
work together with his straitened circumstances, told 
upon his spirit. That which stood much in his way 
during those trying months was the fact that he did 
not go enough into society ; his chief obstacle, however, 
was his low estimate of his own powers, which friends 

as well as strangers deplored in him. But if he did 

14— (2318) 



210 THE CAMBRIDGE '' APOSTLES " 

not go out much, he saw most of the Cambridge 
men who passed through or hved in London, and 
he was constantly with Sterhng, who watched over 
him with extraordinary zeal, helping him in his life, 
encouraging him in his work, and fitting in with all 
his moods. " Maurice gets wiser and more practical 
every day," he said ; and if this was true, Maurice was 
learning those virtues in a hard school, for almost 
everything he touched at that time failed dismally. 
When things were at their worst he and Sterling 
decided they would both write a novel, in which 
each should incorporate in romantic form his thoughts 
on the several subjects which had caused them the 
greatest agony of mind. This plan, decided in all 
seriousness, sounds to-day more like the extravagant 
suggestion of a humorist than the sober outcome of 
two serious minds. 

Together too they "took over the Athenceum, hoping 
much from it. Their ''Apostolic" friends sent con- 
tributions to it, and they both worked hard, Maurice 
especially, for [he of himself sometimes filled its pages. 
It is probable that it was the Spanish business which 
gave this paper its coup de grace. The public was not 
so much interested in Spanish '' exiles " as were the 
" Apostles," who meeting them constantly in Sterling's 
rooms fell beneath their spell and made themselves 
their patrons as well as their champions. Maurice 
met many of the Spaniards and knew them well ; but 
though he pleaded their cause in the AthencBum, it 
was in a half-hearted way, for he was not really in 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 211 

sympathy with them. It is possible that he, with all 
respect be it said, may have been a little bored with 
them, and unconsciously allowed his father's losses in 
Spanish bonds and the consequent curtailment of his 
own economic liberty, to have a little prejudiced him 
against the " cause." 

While he was working on his paper, he was at the 
same time working for relaxation at his psychological 
novel \ and, in the course of its development, studi- 
ously weighing and analyzing — confuting or agreeing 
with — every theory and opinion which presented 
itself to the mind of its hero ; as a result, his concord- 
ance with the beliefs of the Church became strength- 
ened and he presently resolved to take his degree after 
all, with an ultimate view to Holy Orders. Julius 
Hare, on discovering this, urged his return to Cam- 
bridge — although he feared, while persuading, that 
he had not then enough of determined aim in him to 
accomplish much. But Maurice, remembering the 
suffering he had experienced through the falseness 
of his former position at that University, shrank from 
returning there. On this John Sterling entered his 
name at Oxford, whither he went in 1829, to Exeter 
College, where Sterling soon followed him. When it 
became known that Maurice had taken this unusual 
step, people wondered how he could bring himself to 
recommence life in this way ; on which he said he 
thought that to begin again as an undergraduate 
would be " profitable humiliation to him after the airs 
he had given himself in his literary life." 



212 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Friends at Cambridge gave him introductions to 
Oxford friends. In thanking Hare for the" flattering 
testimony " which he had given on his behalf — which 
was of substantial assistance to him in obtaining con- 
cessions from the Oxford authorities in respect of terms 
he had kept at Cambridge — he said he thought, as his 
tendency had hitherto been to be too loose and inco- 
herent in his speculations, that the habit of the place 
(Oxford) might operate rather as a useful check than as 
a dangerous temptation to him. " If I could hope to 
combine in myself something of that freedom and 
courage for which the young men whom I knew at 
Cambridge were remarkable, with something more of 
solidity and reverence for what is established, I should 
begin to fancy that I had some useful qualities for a 
member of the Church of England." 

Arthur Hallam wrote to Gladstone, exhorting him 
to cultivate Maurice's acquaintance. " An acquantance 
which from all I have heard must be invaluable. I 
do not myself know Maurice, but I know well many 
whom he has known and whom he has moulded like a 
second nature, and these, too, men eminent for intellec- 
tual power, to whom the presence of a commanding 
spirit would, in all other cases, be a signal rather for 
rivalry than for reverential acknowledgment. The 
effect which he produced on the minds of many at 
Cambridge by the creation of that society of the 
* Apostles ' (for the spirit, though not the form was 
created by him) is far greater than I dare to calculate, 
and will be felt both directly and indirectly in the age 
that is upon us." 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 213 

" I know Maurice well/' said Mr. Gladstone, " had 
heard superlative accounts of him from Cambridge, and 
strove hard to make them all realities to myself . . . 
I think he and other friends did me good, but I got 
little solid meat from him, as I found him difficult to 
catch, and still more difficult to hold." 

Gladstone also tells how once Maurice, being due to 
read a paper before the " Essay Club " (a society which 
had been inaugurated on the lines of the "Apostles"), was 
found, when they all arrived for the reading, in his own 
room engaged in writing the beginning of an entirely 
new essay, having been so discontented with his first 
attempt that he had thrown it into the fire. 

Maurice went to Oxford entirely without enthus- 
iasm. His credentials commanded for him a welcome 
from every one worth knowing in the University, 
which was at that time full of interesting men ; of a 
different order of thought and expression, it is true, 
from the brilliant circle with which he had been 
intimate at Cambridge, but more in harmony, perhaps, 
with his own grave and conscientious disposition. In 
fact, there is no doubt that Maurice was intended by 
Providence for Oxford, and that he felt far more in 
his element in the sedate society he found there than 
in the light-hearted set he had left behind him. His 
intercourse with his new friends, however, did not 
make upon him the mark he had anticipated ; the fact 
being that he was less impressionable than he had 
been two or three years before ; also that he was pass- 
ing though a crisis which kept all his thoughts self- 



214 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

centred and left them comparatively insensible to 
external influences. Although his opinions were far 
better disciplined than in the old Cambridge days, it 
must have cost him considerable moral disquietude 
when the time came for him actually to endorse by 
his signature the uncongenial Thirty-Nine Articles. 
He vented his feelings some years later in a pamphlet 
called Subscription no Bondage, which was shown to 
both Pusey and Newman and taken and accepted by 
them without surprise and without comment, they 
having, Maurice thinks, both of them subscribed to 
the articles in much the same state of mind as he had 
done. There never was a franker, more candid spirit 
than Maurice's. He says himself of this outburst : 
" I had a moderately clear instinct when I wrote it 
that I never could be acceptable to any of the schools 
in the Church : that if I maintained what seemed to 
me the true position of a Churchman, I must be in 
hostility more or less marked with each of them." 
Later, when his views had changed and he was strong 
enough to repudiate his own sentiments, he wrote 
another paper in which he advised the abolition of tests 
and which he entitled Subscription is Bondage — a volte- 
face trying even for a humble man. 

Maurice may be said to have been reared on sermons. 
All his family were in the habit of writing, in all good 
faith, long and earnest homilies to one another ; and 
although family affection was not the warmest of his 
emotions, he could speak of these letters almost 
poetically, showing that their advent gave him one of 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 215 

his few perfect pleasures. Speaking of a dearly-loved 
sister's burial, soon after his joining the Church, he 
said : " There is something exquisitely painful in the 
insensibility and apathy I have hitherto experienced, 
but it is wicked to make a complaint. ... I feel 
that everybody put into this earth is a new invasion 
of Satan's present dominion, a new declaration that 
Christ is coming to claim the earth for His Church." 

Whenever in early days he was over persuaded into 
giving an opinion on the thoughts or conduct of others, 
he always regretted it, and would say : '' Of all spirits, 
I believe the spirit of judging is the worse, and it has 
the rule of me I cannot tell how dreadfully and how 
long." 

While thinking over the Ordination Service, he said : 
" I am not going into a Church in which I look for a 
bed of down. That as an establishment it will be 
overturned, I know not how soon, I am nearly con- 
vinced. Yet I would sooner be a member of it now 
than in the days of its greatest prosperity." His 
depression of spirits during his fight with family and 
friends over his conversion had a prejudicial effect 
upon the work he was putting into his novel, with the 
result that he was advised to cut half of it away. 

On this he re-modelled the book, though the entailed 
delay caused him disappointment and anxiety, for 
he had thought, with the hopefulness of that far- 
off day, with the profits on his story, to pay his ex- 
penses at Oxford. Fortunately soon afterwards the 
financial position of his people became substantially 



2i6 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

improved, and when the book was ultimately finished 

Sterling took it in hand and succeeded in getting it 

published, and after it was out pushed it all he could. 

But Eustace Conway was not a pleasing book, though 

one critic maintained that *' A work of such power, of 

such intimate knowledge of the human soul, can 

never be a failure." In sending a copy to Trench, 

Maurice said: ** There will be nothing in it, I am sure, 

which can tempt you to any Lot's-wife act of looking 

at the doomed city from which you have escaped." 

This was a reference to the days when Trench had 

written a play and had himself made designs for 

novels. At the annual dinner of the '' Apostles " 

that year, 1834, Maurice was toasted three times by 

his " Apostolic " brethren. First as an author of the 

Club. Second as having taken Orders since the last 

meeting. Third as the author of Eustace Conway. 

When the chaplaincy of Guy's was offered him 
he gratefully accepted it, feeling convinced that his 
work was on the battlefield and that the battle was 
to be fought in London. As his fame increased, 
and his new opinions became more and more widely 
known, many of his old friends fell out with him on 
account of his broader views, while others avoided 
his company lest they might find they could no longer 
agree. Maurice was never a companionable thinker : 
that is to say, it was never in his nature, if puzzled by 
a problem, to take it to his friends and seek their help 
in solving it. He would rather seclude himself and 
work it out alone. This moral unsociability was 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 217 

a source of great distress to him ; he felt keenly the 
fact that he was not able to converse freely with those 
who loved him best concerning the workings of his 
mind ; and he knew, although he could not alter 
his temperament, that it was this reticence which 
kept some friends at a distance, and which offended 
others. 

But although he could not bring himself to discuss 
current questions with his intimates, he was able to 
find some relief, as his views became definite and 
formulated, in giving them forth to the world at large 
in the form of pamphlets and sermons. During the 
various crises in the Oxford movement, we find him 
from time to time endeavouring to bring the world 
back again to " simple and trustful vievv^s." " Oh 
that our High Churchmen," he exclaims, " would but 
be Catholics ! At present they seem to me three parts 
Papist and one part Protestant, but the tertium quid, 
the glorious product of each element so different from 
both, I cannot discern even in the best of them." 

There was never a man with a less self-seeking 
nature than Maurice. More than once, when prefer- 
ment was offered him, he said : " If I am to do anything 
for the Church, it must be in a subordinate position," 
and he would proceed to urge the claims of some one 
else in his place. It was while delivering a series of 
lectures at Guy's Hospital that he commenced his 
important work on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 
which remains a monument to his intellectual powers 
as well as to his indefatigable industry. He was 



2i8 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

an admirable writer — lucid, forcible, elegant, often 
picturesque — but he lacked one quality essential to 
lasting fame and greatness, one which must be freely 
given by the gods, for it cannot be acquired, even 
at Cambridge ; Maurice was entirely deficient in 
humour. 

It was in 1838 that he was introduced to Carlyle 
by James Spedding, at his hospitable rooms at Lin- 
coln's Inn — the first meeting-place of so many of the 
great men of the day. In this case the friendship did 
not progress far. The two admired each other, it 
is true, but somewhat grudgingly. Maurice was not 
at his ease with Carlyle, and whenever they met 
would awkwardly burst into controversy with him, 
a contingency which Carlyle always sought to avoid. 
Maurice, too, imagined, no doubt erroneously, that 
Carlyle thought him *' a sham," and this did not tend 
to bring the two philosophers of opposite schools into 
affectionate relations. Carlyle's lectures always made 
considerable impression upon Maurice, though he 
criticized them freely, and maintained that the 
'* Sage " would *' say and repeat things he laughed 
to scorn in other men." He complained loudly too 
of Carlyle's " silly rant about the great bosom of 
nature." It is difficult to say why these two should 
have failed so utterly to get on together, except that 
their natures were essentially different — that Carlyle 
having once formed an opinion upon a point was 
content, while Maurice seldom was. But Maurice's 
attitude towards Carlyle resembled his attitude towards 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 219 

the *' Schools " — it was -eminently conscientious, 
but pre-eminently unsatisfactory. 

Whenever (and it was often) he felt strongly, he 
rushed into print ; and for a long period his life was 
plunged in controversy ; he was a mettlesome but 
absolutely fair antagonist. He was bitter against 
those who expressed negative feelings in religion, yet 
he wrote his pamphlet on To he on Neither Side, His 
impartiality lost him from time to time some partisans, 
and he at last became conscious that he was not popu- 
lar. The time he suffered most was when he had to 
cut himself from " heretic " friends. For years he was 
sure there was but one man to save the Church, and that 
that man was Manning. He said of him he was the 
" completest man he had ever met," and " if there are 
ten such, I think England is not Sodom." And this 
he said knowing that Manning was suspicious of him 
and perhaps, like Carlyle, not quite sure that he was 
not a " sham." 

He was the most modest preacher of strong views 
that modern times have seen. When he was writing his 
Mental and Moral Philosophy — the work by which 
he will in all probability live — he said : "I like this 
task better than declaiming about greater matters : 
facts are becoming dearer to me every day." 

The amount of physical and mental work which he 
accomplished is incalculable : still he found time 
for relaxation. He saw Tennyson and Milnes when- 
ever he could. Spedding and Venables were his close 
associates, and the most sympathetic of his friends. 



220 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

He was not intimate with all our '* Apostles/' but 
that was probably because he travelled in realms 
whither some of them could not follow him. Brook- 
field he met constantly — their duties as well as their 
inclinations bringing them often together. Brook- 
field notes in his diary that Mrs. Brookfield would go 
surreptitiously to Lincoln's Inn to hear Maurice, and 
" This afternoon Thackeray and Garden came to 
luncheon. Mrs. B. and Garden went after to Lincoln's 
Inn Chapel to hear Maurice. I called on Sir E. Perry, 
where was Phinn, M.P. I sat a long while talking, 
and finally went into Mrs. EUiot's, where Lady Heslop, 
Mrs. C. Elliot, and W. Harcourt. Dined at home, 
Thackeray and Harcourt joining in with infinite mirth. 
They, with Jane, were talking before dinner how the 
second lesson that afternon had been ' quite a chapter 
for Maurice,' apparently unconscious how exactly 
like other cliques and religious coteries they were 
talking." Maurice, though, attended '' ApostoHc " 
meetings. He says once : " I go to-day to dine with 
my old Cambridge friends " (i.e., the ' Apostles ' Club) ; 
'' the bonds which connect me with them are very sacred. 
I owe very much to them — more than any one can 
tell. But I have never rightly used my opportunities, 
and any meeting with them is or should be a reason 
for fresh humihation ; so much good that one might 
do has been left undone, so many words unspoken, 
and so many spoken too much. Oftentimes I have 
thought I would hold no more intercourse with them 
(though I always learn something from them), if I 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 221 

could not be more helpful to them, but I believe it 
is right to keep up every old tie and to strengthen it if 
possible. Good does come out of it, if we are ever so 
weak." 

It is difficult to get at Maurice's real views about 
the " Apostles." On one occasion he said he thought 
some of them ought to " thank God for having passed 
through a debating Society with any part of their 
souls undestroyed." He was constantly fighting the 
press, and in doing so once expounded an important 
truth. " The Record,'' he says,'' which talks of us all 
as infidels " (this was concerning the Sterling Club), 
" has been the cause of more bitter infidelity in the 
younger branches of religious families than all Vol- 
taire's writings together." 

But Maurice's contempt for human respect led him 
to perhaps an injudicious disregard of the impression 
his conduct conveyed. For instance, he mixed him- 
self up with Socialism in times when its purest form 
could not, by the public eye, be distinguished from 
its foulest, and so he was misunderstood ; he brought 
obloquy on himself by his teachings on certain points 
which the Guardian pronounced to be dangerous, and 
which it condemned. And partly in consequence of 
this he was asked, after thirteen years of splendid 
work, to resign his professorship at King's College. 

After the stormy comments which all this provoked, 
Tennyson's invitation to him reflects glory on the poet 
as a friend and as an " Apostle." In the rhymed 
invitation to the Isle of Wight, does he not tenderly 
say — 



222 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

You'll have no scandal while you dine, 
But honest talk and wholesome wine, 
And only hear the magpie gossip. 
Garrulous under a roof of pine. 

We might discuss the Northern sin 
Which made a selfish war begin ; 

How best to help the slender store, 
How mend the dwellings of the poor ; 
How gain, in life, as life advances. 
Valour and charity more and more. 

Monckton Milnes, who always kept on happy terms 
with Maurice, and loved him the more as he became 
the more notorious, commenting upon this business, 
at the Grange, the Christmas after it occurred, said: 
" Lord Radstock was the theologian who condemned 
Maurice in the King's College Council. . . . Where- 
upon Venables maintained that Maurice, in that hour, 
'gave the grandest example of human nature possible.* " 

That which most affected Maurice during this un- 
happy time was the address of sympathy presented to 
him by a body of working men — a touching memorial 
which embodied in it a hint that he should place him- 
self at the head of a college for working men. Edu- 
cation being Maurice's great hope for the country — his 
lecture on Has the Church or the State the Right to 
Educate the Nation ? might with profit be now read 
— the idea grew in his mind, and soon a scheme was 
drawn up which became the basis of a college for this 
purpose. He himself took a house, and arranged 
it and invited professors to give their services to it. 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 223 

and so started one of the most wonderful institutions 
of modern times. 

Although a Church Reformer, it is on social questions 
that Maurice is best seen. Here his ambitions, his 
organizing faculties, his true and heartiest sympathies, 
had] their best scope and most comprehensive ex- 
pression. These were his true life's work — which once 
begun, he carried on with rare genius ; and the suc- 
cess of all that he inaugurated in this way is the best 
testimony to the excellence of his plans and the 
greatness of his abilities. A part of a fine letter 
written to some one who suggested that Charles 
BuUer's scheme for emigration for our poor was in- 
expedient, is worth quoting : " Colonization is not 
transportation : it is a brave, hearty, Saxon, Chris- 
tian work. To stir up men and women to engage in 
it is to stir them up to feel that they are men and 
women in the highest, truest sense of the words." 

His working men were the first to congratulate him 
on his appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy 
at Cambridge ; though when this tardy compliment 
was paid to him his life and his work were nearly over : 
but when Donne, his brother ** Apostle," also wrote 
he replied : " I thank you most gratefully for your 
kind and candid note. It is a very great pleasure, 
a greater pleasure than I ever looked for, to have been 
so treated by the University, but the welcome which 
my friends have given me on my appointment has 
been more to me than the Chair itself. I do not 
know when I have had so much kindness shown me, 



224 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

though I have had a very unusual and undeserved 
share of it at all times." 

It is difficult in these days to reconstruct in any 
way the interest, the glamour, or the fascination that 
Maurice had for the men of his time. If one writes 
of him now, somewhat unenthusiastically, it is because 
one is angered to find with his great gifts he did not 
do more ; but there seem to have been few in his 
own time but felt the attraction of his presence and 
the high superiority of his mind. He was ideally 
handsome, with a beauty of the highest order, which 
he never reckoned as a contributing cause to his success 
as a preacher ; he had a melodious voice and a flow of 
good words, but he was never merely the orator ; mat- 
ter he placed always before manner ; and if his voice 
trembled when he spoke, it was from the force of his 
own sincere convictions and from no cultivated affec- 
tation. Milnes once said to Gladstone : "I wish 
you had mentioned Maurice in your estimate of 
preachers — to me it was more apostolic than any- 
thing I ever heard." As a fashionable preacher, he 
was pursued and teased in the ordinary way ; and 
he had, even amongst his own disciples, those who 
pointed out to him new lines of thought as well as 
new routes to follow. For years he held and domin- 
ated a large affectionate public, all willing to be led 
— he willing to lead. An earnest, tender soul, no one 
doubted his spirituality. Kingsley's idea of him was 
no doubt the correct one : '* His humility was carried 
to an extreme ; unaware of his own intellectual and his 



FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 225 

own practical and governing power, he would submit 

at times when he ought to have ruled, or listen when 

he ought to have commanded." He had a protective 

personality. He took under his wing the poor, the 

sick, the oppressed, and women ; to all of these he 

gave out all he had of sympathy and assistance ; he was 

also a warm supporter of female suffrage. In fact to 

women Maurice's courtesy and consideration was as 

chivalrous as it was unstinted. His patience was 

beautiful, his acceptance of them as equal with himself 

in brain, and in all organizing mental capacity, one 

of those confidences which led to the greater freedom 

of women, and to their bettered position to-day. 

When he died all England felt the jar caused by the 

cutting away of so tenacious and earnest a personality, 

those who had disagreed with him as well as those who 

had agreed. Edward W. Tait, one of his disciples, 

in one of his charming letters, says — and he expressed 

the opinion of all Maurice's followers — " I feel as if I 

had lost a second father in losing Maurice out of this 

world. ... I owe more to Maurice, I think, than to 

any one else. There was a requisition that he should 

be buried in Westminster Abbey, but according to his 

own wish he was buried quite quietly with his own 

kindred at Highgate. I went to the funeral, and the 

simplicity and solemnity of it I shall never forget. 

After the service was ended, some men and women 

of the Working Men's College, which he had formed 

and over which he had watched for so long, sang two 

or three hymns — very badly but all the more impres- 
ts— (2318) 



226 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

sively — ending with 'Abide with Me/ in which every- 
body joined. Nothing could have been more truly 
grand and appropriate than these simple people sing- 
ing their songs of faith and hope in a quiet corner of a 
common cemetery over the grave of the great teacher 
whose lessons, taught gently and quietly to all men 
alike as his brothers, have in them the powei which 
will presently reform this country of England, and 
through it, largely, the whole world." 



CHAPTER XI 

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 

Friends 

Keep, oh ! keep your Paradise ! 
Once I gained your happy place, 
Ardent in the healthy race, 
One of many braced together, 
Comrades of the way and weather. 

(Richard Monckton Milnes.) 

Among the lights of those days, some shot their beams 
farther than others, some were steadier and some 
purer ; but the most brilliant luminary of them all 
was undoubtedly Richard Monckton Milnes. His 
social advantages were exceptional, and his amazing 
and delightful personality enabled him to avail him- 
self of them to the fullest extent. He had high ability 
and wide ideas, the former of which enabled him to 
fascinate and bewilder the world with the originality 
of the latter. His earliest recorded expression was 
eminently characteristic, when, as a child, he first saw 
the open sea, and vehemently proclaimed his rage and 
disappointment that it was not bigger. From his 
youth up he displayed a virile self-confidence ; he 
never doubted his own powers. " I must work my 
own way unpatronized, or not at all," was the motto 
of a satisfied and independent mind. 

827 



228 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Although his education had been in private hands, 
he was fairly well equipped when he arrived at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, in 1827. ^is mother went with 
him, arranged his books in their shelves, and wistfully 
watched him from a gallery at his first dinner in Hall. 
" He sat by Wordsworth " (Master of Trinity), '' and 
seemed as much at home amongst the dons as if he 
had been there for years." 

Milnes, overjoyed to get to College, and enthusiastic 
about his surroundings, flung himself at once into the 
spirit of the place. In those days the aristocracy — 
and plutocracy — were wont to become what were 
called " Fellow-Commoners," a privileged sect (that 
against which Lushington fulminated) who enjoyed, by 
paying for them, sundry indulgences and exemptions, 
and who inspired their humbler fellow-students with 
awe and envy. But since Thackeray gave his own 
special significance to the word " snob," and caused a 
social revolution, especially at his old University, by 
the delightful book in which he illustrated his defini- 
tion, the Golden Calf has gradually lost many of its 
worshippers at Cambridge, until nowadays both 
" Fellow-Commoners " and " Sizars " — the high priests 
and the servers of the culte — have ceased to be. It 
was, however, in the natural order of things, as they 
then existed, that Milnes should become a *' Fellow- 
Commoner." It was some royal blood on his mother's 
side which gave him a claim to this advantage, and 
it was his father's blood which gave him a taste for it. 
It was a position, said a fellow "Apostle," "which 




Ridiard Moiickioii Milncs 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 229 

enabled young men who were capable of it to profit 
by the conversation of Dons." 

When Tennyson saw Milnes for the first time, he 
said he thought him the most good-humoured and 
the best-tempered creature he had ever seen, and " a 
man I should like to know"; while Arthur Hallam 
said he was " one of our aristocracy of intellect here, 
a kind-hearted fellow, as well as a clever one, but vain 
and paradoxical." It was perhaps youthful vanity 
which prompted him to write, on the subject of his 
height, "Pray console my mother about my growth 
by Lord Monson being a head less than I am ; Grattan 
and Fox were both little men, and so was St. Paul," 
but it was far more probably a little audacious 
banter. 

After he and his fellow-freshmen had joined the 
" Union Debating Society," where " a Mr. Sterling 
told us we were going to have a revolution, and he 
didn't care if his hand should be the first to lead the 
way," it was found that Milnes had some power of 
speaking in him if he would " cultivate it well," and 
that he was " as ambitious as was reasonable " — 
these were Hallam' s opinions. " What a rare thing 
is a grown-up mind! " said Milnes of Hallam in return. 

On the occasion of the Shelley v. Byron mission in 
1829 to Oxford, Milnes, when he asked leave to go on 
that errand, did not feel it his duty to be clear as to 
whether it were the poet Wordsworth or the poet Shelley 
whose glory was the object of the deputation ; and he 
afterwards, in his candid fashion, said, " I may per- 



230 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

haps have impHed it was the former. ... I wanted 
to see the place and the men ... we drove manfully- 
through the snow . . . arrived in time to speak that 
night . . . feted next day. Saw the lions — and came 
back next morning." 

He had, with several of his contemporaries, the 
sort of genius which does not lend itself to competi- 
tion, yet, on one occasion when he fancied he had 
failed to excel in an examination, we find this self- 
possessed young worldling — paradoxical even in his 
emotions — flinging himself upon a sofa in an agony 
of tears. It subsequently turned out he had done 
better than he had imagined. 

There is no doubt that he loved advertisement ; 
there are many men, not merely politicians or soldiers, 
but men with exalted poetical natures, to whom life 
is savourless without the sauce of reclame. But the 
extravagance of some of his juvenile pranks was due 
less to any vulgar desire to attract attention than to 
the whimsicality of his inclinations. He had a natural 
desire to judge of everything by personal investiga- 
tion. His thirst for a new experience took him even 
up in a balloon — in days when aerial travellers were 
few. While floating in the air on that occasion he 
wrote a rapturous letter to Arthur Hallam, to which 
his sober friend replied, " I had been sceptical aU along as 
to your possessing physical courage enough to venture." 
Milnes had a high appreciation of Hallam's genius, 
and complains in a letter, " I do not see Hallam once 
for the twenty times I am with Fitzroy or O'Brien," 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 231 

though on another occasion he proudly begins, 
" Hallam is in my great chair. ... I found a sonnet 
from him awaiting me in town, which ended — 

... a sterner part assume, 
Whether thou championest Urania's strife, 
Or, marked by Freedom for her toga'd sway, 
Reclaim'st thy father's soon abandoned bay," 

which looks as if Arthur sometimes endeavoured to 
tutor the gay and airy Milnes into sobriety and dis- 
cretion. 

Milnes was always amusingly discursive about the 
" Apostles," and was a joy to them, though some- 
thing of an anxiety. Blakesley, despite his great 
esteem for him, was of opinion that " the Society 
does not gain much from him." " I read an essay 
on the state of the country, at a Society called the 
* Apostles,' last Saturday," Milnes wrote ; "I hurried 
it too much to be very good. One party called it too 
metaphysical, the other (the greater part) too practi- 
cal, but it took altogether very well." 

When he left Cambridge he had youthful romantic 
ambitions, chiefly political, and with regard to these 
he sought the advice of Lady Morgan, who said to 
him, " They who would legislate for the world must 
live in the world," astute common-sense which the 
urbane Milnes accepted with content. When he went 
down, as it was not yet time to start on his political 
career, he joined his family abroad, where they were 
living — so they alleged — for economy ; though they 



232 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

appear to have dwelt in marble palaces and to have 
entertained all the illustrious of the land. Young 
Milnes wrote : *' Cardinal Weld has done a beautiful 
drawing for mamma ; he says ' It is not much, but he 
does not think she will find another Cardinal to do it 
better.' " 

The new experience of travel and foreign surround- 
ings for the time being drove politics from his mind, 
and awoke in him fresh enthusiasms, especially for 
scenery and for all that was beautiful. " What is 
Italy without Rome ? What Syria without Jerusa- 
lem ? What Egypt without Thebes and Alexandria ? " 
The man who found the " Coliseum " had '' a glory 
of ruin which must be grander than its first perfection/' 
was an artist as well as a poet, but Milnes gave himself 
up entirely to poetry. His was a genius which could 
have enriched the world through the medium of any 
art he had chosen to espouse ; but poetry was the 
popular mistress of the hour. All his friends wrote 
verse, notably Tennyson and Hallam, and could he 
not do the same ? argued Milnes. Much of his 
poetry was written in circumstances illustrative of the 
power of the man. He would easily and cheerfully 
get though any poetic task he might set himself, and 
produce a masterpiece before setting forth in pursuit 
of other pleasures ; and no one ever lived with a 
greater capacity for pleasure than Monckton Milnes. 

The first great steadying shock of his young life 
was the death of Arthur Hallam. He said — for he had 
not seen him for some time before his death — 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 233 

I thought, how should I see him first, 
How should our hands first meet, 
Within his room, upon the stairs — 
At the corner of the street ? 
I thought, where should I hear him first, 
How catch his greeting tone ? 
And thus I went up to his door. 
And they told me he was gone ! 

He mourned for Hallam " as for a brother " : 

For I have lost the veriest friend 
Whom ever a friend could name. 

Milnes had plenty of sympathy ; it was not very deep 
— that would be too much to look for in one with such 
a nature — but it was consistent and universal. The 
death of this young friend caused him to lament " the 
loss of youth," and brought forth from him poems 
connected with hfe's young day, which are some of 
the most charming and affecting of his works. His 
artistic temperament made him take delighted interest 
in all that he produced himself. When he got back 
to Rome in 1834, ^^ says ingenuously, " I wish I had 
brought some copies of my book here. It would have 
gone off immensely. . . . There are here Garden and 
Monteith and Trench. We are quite a Cambridge 
coterie." His book went off very well, and in a way 
to cheer him, though he says it did not sell at a 
" vulgar rate." 

Macarthy, a friend to whom Milnes always un- 
bosomed himself, says of this time : "In the spring 
of 1834 I was one day returning from one of the 
gorgeous ceremonies of Easter at St. Peter's, in com- 



234 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

pany with Trench and Milnes. Milnes in his red 
military uniform, I in black silk academic gown, were 
sauntering along the Tiber. Trench, who came up 
to us, said in his deep voice, ' I was just thinking that, 
after all, there are but two professions in the world 
worth professing — those two ' (pointing to our 
dresses). ' Yes,' said Milnes, ' but we neither of us 
belong to them ; Macarthy is as much a Churchman 
as I am a soldier, that is to say, not at all.' " 

It was to Macarthy, who did not go into the Church, 
that Milnes once quaintly observed : " The thing I 
was intended for by nature is a German woman. I 
have just that mixture of hdusliche Thdtigkeit and 
Sentiment alitdt that characterizes that category of 
Nature. I think Goethe would have fallen in love 
with me ; and I am not sure that Platen didn't." 

Milnes believed in the cultivation of the poetic 
faculty, and encouraged youths to practise it, be- 
lieving that it taught men to " divide the sphere of 
imagination from that of practical life, and obviate 
dangers that so often arise from the want of this 
distinction." "There is no better preservative than 
the poetic faculty from religious hallucinations, from 
political discussions, and, I would say, even from 
financial extravagance." When he also said, " The 
greater portion of the verses I have written were 
that product of the lyrical period of youth which is 
by no means uncommon among modern civilization," 
he was writing at a period when even the young 
" bucks " deemed it not unmanly to cultivate certain 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 235 

elegancies of mind, and when games were frankly 
ranked as pastimes, and not as occupations. 

At one time he was looked on as the successor to 
the Laureateship. Landor, at a breakfast at Rogers', 
maintained that Milnes was the greatest poet then living 
and writing in England ; and he certainly had a 
following who, during the mid- Victorian age, thought 
him the poet of the century. It is unquestionable that 
in some of his verse he reached great heights. Had 
Tennyson not come to the fore, Milnes would have done 
even greater things than he did. But he would not exert 
himself against a giant whose powers he admired so 
much. When he withdrew gracefully from the lists, it 
was not in fear of a possible conqueror, but in favour of 
a popular aspirant who was also an old friend — one 
whom, in his generosity of heart, he had sooner see 
crowned than wear the bays himself. It was, in fact, 
he who recommended Tennyson for the Laureateship. 
" I am in no hurry to publish my poems . . . and 
when the world's such that Alfred Tennyson does not 
think it worth while to write down his compositions, 
there need be no rash eagerness on my part." 

In 1844 Milnes published a volume of his works 
with the following dedication: ''To the members of 
' The Conversazione Society ' established and still 
continued in the University of Cambridge. This edition 
of ' Poems of Many Years ' In grateful remembrance of 
knowledge communicated, affection interchanged, and 
intelligence expanded'' These compliments were 
highly appreciated by the " Apostles," for the httle 



236 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

book contains most of his best work. The following 
passage from '' The Flight of Youth " is wonderfully 
reminiscent of Sir Philip Sydney, without being in 
any way a copy of the soldier-poet : 

Alas ! we know not how he went, 

We knew not he was going, 

For had our tears once found a vent. 

We had stayed him with their flowing. 

It was as an earthquake, when 

We awoke and found him gone, 

We were miserable men. 

We were hopeless, every one ! 

Yes, he must have gone away 

In his guise of every day — 

In his common dress, the same 

Perfect face, and perfect frame ; 

For in feature, for in limb 

Who could be compared to him ? 

Recalling a walk in his youth, he says : 

. . . with you a'strolling hand in hand 
Break lances in a tournament of rhyme — 
Dispute about the tints of faery-land — 
Or, by some heritage which olden Time 
Has left the wise. 

Bid wondrous pageants, as by sorcerer's wand, 
Before us rise. 

Modern lovers of poetry should turn to the works 
of Monckton Milnes ; unlike those of a minor poet, 
they stand the test of time ; indeed, the only trace 
of age they show is scholarship. He stands forth 
pre-eminent and for always the Poet of Youth. 

How we have joyed, when all our mind was joy, 
How we have loved, when love was all our law. 

Looked with half envy on the rising boy, 
And thought of manhood with religious awe. 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 237 

Perhaps his most beautiful Hnes of all were those 
inspired by the verse : ** O that I were as I was in the 
days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon 
my Tabernacle." But it was his " Palm Leaves," in 
which he sings of the East after a romantic visit 
thither, which attracted the most contemporary notice. 
De Tocqueville wrote : " You seem to have returned 
too much the Mussulman. I cannot make out why in 
these days so many distinguished minds evince this 
tendency." Sydney Smith said : " Milnes is the 
writer who sent out * Palm Leaves ' which came back 
Laurels." Kinglake criticized them in the Quarterly, 
upon which Milnes affirmed by way of rejoinder that 
he himself, had he chosen, could have written ** E6- 
then " — " that is nearly.'' 

Although poetry was the art he loved, he wrote 
prose besides. His Keats' Life and Literary Remains 
is written and compiled with admirable tact and 
artistic sympathy ; and his mind had lost none of its 
keenness nor vivacity when, twenty years later, he 
published his brilliant Monographs. It is interesting 
to learn from him that he found he wrote poems less 
true in expression as he began to write prose more 
easily. He contributed to the principal magazines and 
reviews ; he was also the author of numerous pam- 
phlets, of which one of the most earnest and serious 
was his One Tract More. This he wrote under the nom 
de plume " A Layman," and in it he says : 

** Persecution was a refusal to recognize religions on 
the part of those who acknowledged secular authority. 



238 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

It was in this theory of the Church of England that the 
Continental Protestants nicknamed it ' Parliament faith ' 
— and that Melancthon maintains that the German 
Lutherans named those who had suffered for the re- 
formed cause in England the Devil's Martyrs." 

The whole tract was a fine piece of special pleading, 
and it was much praised by his friends. For Milnes 
made no concealment of his eagerness to hear what 
people thought of his work, and whenever he published 
anything fresh he would go the round of friends and 
acquaintances to hear their opinions and enjoy their 
congratulations. 

Milnes had always strong Catholic leanings. At 
Cambridge, while many of his friends were for a time 
under the spell of the German philosophers, he was 
never attracted by their unlovely dogmas. And no 
doubt during his sunny holidays in Rome his imagina- 
tion must have been still further stimulated by the 
graceful emblems and magnificent monuments which 
surrounded him. Had he, like most of his " Apos- 
tolic " contemporaries, had the habit of serious intro- 
spection, he would probably have found he was already 
in his heart what his mind inclined him to be. But 
the paradoxical Milnes was always least serious when 
contemplating most serious subjects. However the 
teetotum of his mind might vacillate as it spun, it always 
fell finally light side up. He was one of the first to 
subscribe himself an " English Catholic." " These are 
* shocking ' bad times for me," he once remarked in 
early days ; " but a liberal-minded English Catholic 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 239 

would be a great game to play in Rome, if he had wit 
or will enough." His friend O'Brien at the same 
period said to him : " It is a pity you have no faith; 
now that we are all settling down in faith, you ought 
not to go on frittering your fine talents and good heart 
on things that win you neither respect nor love." It 
was this gentleman who told Milnes, " You are near 
something very glorious, but you will never reach it," 
and he was something of a prophet. 

On occasions Milnes would write thoughtfully on theo- 
logical questions : as for instance when he comments on 
the singular fact that both Gospel and Church should 
be silent on the matter of the re-union of living souls 
after death. " If the bond of affection be in itself 
indissoluble, there must be sameness if not a unity of 
destination for souls which are thus banded ; and how 
is this irreconcilable with the adjustment of spiritual 
differences, to say nothing of awards and punishments ? 
Can we conceive a soul at once enjoying intellectual 
communion with the wise Heathen, affectionate com- 
munion with the object of its earthly love, and spiritual 
communion with Christ and the Saints ? " 

But if others discussed religious matters in a serious 
manner, it was rare for Milnes to take his tone from 
them. On one occasion, when some of the more pon- 
derous-minded of his fellow " Apostles " were sitting 
in solemn conclave upon one of Dr. Pusey's Oxford 
sermons, and by dint of serious thought and analytical 
argument were arriving slowly — and most of them 
reluctantly — at the conclusion that it was to be pro- 



240 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

scribed, Milnes entirely changed the tone of the dis- 
cussion (to the scandal of his graver hearers) by 
jauntily suggesting that the sermon undoubtedly 
deserved to be condemned — for its length. 

In politics he displayed an amount of orderliness 
and method, a quickness and firmness of grasp, a 
power of rapidly unravelling complications and imme- 
diately placing every fact in its proper mental pigeon- 
hole, hardly to be expected in so volatile a nature. 
He knew by instinct the way to the back-stairs of 
politics, and the secret thoughts and schemes of poli- 
ticians, and he had such discretion — another unex- 
pected virtue — that he could chat on international 
questions with kings and diplomats and gossip around 
state secrets, apparently without reserve, and yet 
without betraying a hint which could possibly strain 
relations. 

When he stood for Pontefract as a Conservative, his 
triumph, which was signal, was hailed with delight by 
his friends, who, as they did not hesitate to tell him, 
did not till the last moment know the colour of his 
politics. He tried hard and ingeniously to maintain 
an independent position, an attitude which often 
brought down abuse upon him and caused his consti- 
tuents sometimes to doubt his good faith. He did not 
take politics so lightly as he took other interests. To 
become a great statesman was the one serious end of 
his ambitions, and he devoted himself to its achieve- 
ment with heart and soul. But although he had the 
qualifications of a great diplomatist, he had not the 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 241 

temperament of a successful politician. Artist to the 
finger-tips, he could never have become anything so 
bourgeois as a party leader. Gradually he realized 
that the parliamentary boat was not one in which he 
was destined to occupy his favourite and usual thwart 
— that of stroke ; in fact he found that it was a galley 
in which he had no particular place at all. Peel re- 
fused him the part of Under-Secretary for Foreign 
Affairs, and this no doubt hipped him and influenced 
him to some extent in his experiment of a change of 
politics. When Peel's course of action was being dis- 
cussed and criticized at The Grange, Carlyle exclaimed : 
" No, no ; Peel knows what he is about. There is only 
one fit post for you, Mjlnes ; and that is the Office of 
Perpetual President of the Heaven and Hell Amalga- 
mation Society." During the same house party Lady 
Ashburton, on being told there was a rumour that 
Milnes had accepted some Colonial appointment, ex- 
claimed, " I hope not ; we shall have no one to show us 
what we ought not to do and say." 

He never forgave his father for refusing a peerage 
that was offered to him. ** I think that the severe 
dullness of the House of Lords, which Lord Grey used 
to call ' speaking to dead men by torchlight,' would 
have suited my nervous temperament." And when 
Strutt refused a peerage he said, " The disease seems 
catching ; and if the Lords cannot be recruited either 
from the Conservative or the Democratic side, what 
will they come to ? " Luckily for his peace of mind, 
he died unenlightened. 

I6— (2318) 



242 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Milnes helped towards the bringing in of the Copy- 
right Bill, and was great on liberty of conscience. Of 
the clever things he said, he never, perhaps, surpassed 
" Gladstone's method of impartiality is being furi- 
ously earnest on both sides of the question." He was 
in sympathy with the Suffrage for Women, and led the 
movement for the legislation of Marriage with a De- 
ceased Wife's Sister, questions on which feeling still 
runs high. As an instance of wasted enthusiasm, the 
story may be told parenthetically of a young marquis 
of a later period who left a houseful of guests and 
travelled a ten hours' journey to oppose the Deceased 
Wife's Sister Bill in the Lords. " You don't often put 
yourself out like this on your country's behalf," ob- 
served a club acquaintance. " Ah ! but this is a case 
when one's hound to put one's self out a bit," replied 
the young peer. '' Ido think it'll be an infernal shame 
if they oblige a chap to marry his Deceased Wife's 
Sister — if he don't want to." 

" A Bird of Paradox," according to Mrs. Norton, 
the *' Cool of the Evening " and " London Assurance " 
to the rest of the world, Milnes with all his persiflage 
had a high sense of his own dignity. He challenged 
his man when he found himself insulted ; arranged a 
fight ; was furious at receiving an apology, and loudly 
lamented that duelling could not again be legalized. 

Milnes loved the society of the clever and the great, 
but he was neither a patron nor a parasite. He had 
the " Liberty-Equality-Fraternity " temperament of 
every true artist, and always had the power of feeling 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 243 

at his ease and of conveying the same sense to others. 
In fact, though he preferred his Bohemians in fine — or 
at all events, clean — linen, he was happy in any com- 
pany, high or low, provided it were interesting. His 
parties were always discreetly assorted ; the guest-list 
was ever a work of art like the menu ; he believed in 
mixing like with like ; he would invite the gay to meet 
the lively, the grave the serious ; every one who went 
to his house was usually sure to meet company in 
which he could shine. He used to say, " Other people 
give their friends bread. I like to give them cake." 
At his breakfasts — where " the gods gathered like 
flies " — he always took care to have a goodly sprinkling 
of Cambridge intimates to diffuse the conversation 
and to break up the '' monologues of Smith and Mac- 
aulay." Milnes always maintained that he looked on 
the '* intimate and independent conversation of im- 
portant men as the cream of life." He was a man of 
"sensibility " in the sense in which the older dramatists 
use the term ; he would have liked to have gone about 
discovering and fostering newly-hatched genius — but 
not having the time nor perseverance for that, collected 
around him the full-fledged specimens, who flocked to 
his call. He used to say, " It is not the amount of 
genius or moral power expended, but concentrated, 
that makes what the world calls a great man ; the 
world never sees a man but in one capacity." 

Sydney Smith, who once wished Milnes *' many 
long and hot dinners with lords and ladies, wits and 
poets," was present at the breakfast when Milnes told 



244 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

how ''George IV. in latter years used to speak as if 
he had been present at certain great fox-hunts, battles 
and the like. Some distinguished foreigner being at 
Belvoir when the king was there, his majesty had 
thoroughbreds sent from the royal stables for the 
foreigner and himself, and gave the former his choice. 
When the day came, the king never left his chamber, 
but for long afterwards he would talk of the splendid 
run they had had, and how he was the only one in at 
the death ! So in the presence of the Duke of 
Wellington, George IV. spoke of the charge he had led 
at Vittoria ! After a dinner with the king, some one 
once asked the duke, ' What does all this mean } ' 
* Oh,' answered the duke, ' partly madness and partly 
the habit of lying.' " 

Of the curious range of Milnes' mind, it is only 
necessary to note how easily he could turn from 
poetry to politics and from politics to palmistry. It 
is remarkable to find a man of such shrewd good sense 
saying : " This thunderous weather has made me 
nervously electrical ; I could see the sparks coming 
out of my fingers in the dark. I am going to see the 
somnambulist Alexis this afternoon." 

In breakfasts, as in everything else, Milnes wished 
to be first. " Old Rogers lives and goes on break- 
fasting, but is a good deal estranged from me : I 
rather think he is the loser by it," he observed, with 
cheerful and characteristic effrontery; while of an 
aunt he said, " She wants to give breakfasts like 
mine, but the one last week was quite a failure." 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 245 

On one occasion a son of Garibaldi called upon him 
and sent up his card at a moment when Milnes was 
entertaining a party of Catholics of high rank. The 
gentleman was not admitted, and the distinguished 
prelates were not informed of his visit. " If they had 
met," said Milnes, " what a confirmation it would 
have been of the wildest stories of my parties." To 
no one but the cosmopolitan-minded Milnes could 
such an incident have occurred. A vast volume 
might be compiled of Milnes' obiter dicta. The light 
heart that could say, " I rather think of six weeks 
of Berlin this winter, to rub up my German and 
see whether the king is a humbug," belonged of 
right to the person who broke his ankle " dancing 
a cachuka on a green Alp that was not meant for 
it," and who was in the habit of saying " fresh 
country air and exercise gave him more indigestion 
and uncomfortableness than London dinners and 
doziness." 

Previous to a masked ball at Buckingham Palace, 
Milnes was heard to say he intended to go to it as 
old Chaucer. Wordsworth was seventy-five, but he 
was also going. When told of the younger man's 
intention, he exclaimed, " If Richard Milnes goes to 
the Queen's ball in the character of Chaucer, it only 
remains for me to go in the character of Richard 
Milnes." " You are a man of large heart," said Lady 
Waldegrave to Milnes at this same ball. " That may 
be, but it's not near so useful as a narrow mind," he 
sighed. 



246 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Milnes made Carlyle so welcome to his house that 
he called going there " seeing the felicity of life." 
Brookfield always said he never could decide which 
he liked best in Milnes, " his diabolical good humour, 
or his charitable heart." He did not always approve 
of Milnes' friends, though, and he once records in his 
diary : " Dined en gargon with Milnes at i6, Brook 
Street; Albert Smith, Wigan, Kinglake, Corry, Har- 
court, C. Villiers. For a wonder, not a successful 
mixture nor very agreeable. Smith coarse to a 
degree. Acquiescent recognition of the worse pro- 
fligacy as a matter of course was sickening. Home 
at 10.30." 

Carlyle' s protective patronage over Milnes' writing 
was as beautiful as it was quaint. " You will write 
a book one day which we shall all like," he said to 
him after his article on *' Emerson." ** In prose it 
shall be, if I may vote. A novel, an emblematic 
picture of English society as it is ! Done in prose, 
with the spirit of a poet, what a book were that ! " 
And on another occasion he says, " Milnes has open 
eyes for genius, and reverence for it." Some one 
compared the friendship between the two as "a 
combat between the Secutor and Retiarius of the 
Roman arena." Milnes, giving back praise for praise, 
says, in speaking of the historian's lectures, " Carlyle's 
personality is most attractive. There he stands, 
simple as a child, and his happy thought dances on 
his lips and in his eyes, and takes word and goes 
away, and he bids it God-speed whatever it be." 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 247 

When Milnes was made a peer, his friends were all 
of them genuinely delighted, though Greville com- 
ments somewhat carpingly, " Monckton Milnes has 
obtained the object of his ambition and is created a 
peer by the title of Lord Houghton. People in general 
are rather provoked at his elevation, but he is a 
very good fellow, and I am glad he is made happy." 
It was said, a propos of Milnes' invariable success 
in getting where he wished, "It is to be hoped that 
our Richard will have the legitimate entree to the 
Kingdom of Heaven ; but if not, he will certainly 
hustle St. Peter to get a good place in spite of him." 

Lord Houghton was sent by the Government to 
Paris in 1867, as one of the jurors of the Exhibition 
there, and there he was retained as President of the 
group of the liberal Arts. Before leaving England, 
he wrote to Brookfield, who was already in Paris, that 
he was about to arrive and would be obliged if 
" Brooks " would inform several ladies whom they 
both knew, and whom he knew would like to exercise 
their hospitalities upon him, that he was coming — 
Madame Mohl being one of these. When he reached 
Paris he notes, " I dined yesterday with Madame 
Mohl — quite a crack intellectual party. Brookfield 
came in the evening ; he is librarian to the British 
part of the Exposition, and is lodged and fed at the 
expense of the country." It was during this Paris 
visit, at another party — given by a lady who shall be 
nameless — that Madame Mohl, Lord Houghton and 
Brookfield, all of them used to good living, found that. 



248 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES*' 

though the generous spirit of the hostess was doubtless 
strong, her judgment in clarets was weak. Madame 
Mohl, as she raised a glass of somewhat styptic St. 
Julien to her lips, murmured to her old friends, who 
were on either side of her, " A little unkind that we 
should be asked, at our time of life, to put new wine 
into old bottles." 

Nothing could exceed the completeness and well- 
roundedness of Milnes' charm. His very effrontery had 
an irresistible attraction about it. He delighted his 
contemporaries and delighted in them. He was a man 
of humour who humorously studied himself as well as 
all the world, and was well satisfied with the result. 
He invariably treated himself as he would a pleasant 
acquaintance. Of humour, of which he was past- 
master, he said, " You may generally divide the good- 
ness of your joke by the number of your auditors. A 
joke good enough for half a dozen people will be too 
good for one hundred ; you must coarsen your humour 
for the House of Commons or for any other mob." 
He would certainly say things which no one else could 
say — as when he told the Prince Consort that he and 
himself were the " best after-dinner speakers in 
England." 

Venables, a man of weight, in speaking of his friend, 
said, " Monckton Milnes, whose rare faculty of com- 
bining universality with concentration in his social 
relations has enabled him to outnumber, with the 
catalogue of his genuine friends, any ordinary list of 
common acquaintances." For one thing, he was 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 249 

always more prepared to make friends than most 
people ; his native bonhomie, which, as some one once 
said, " made every one better tempered directly he 
entered a room," made him alert at all times and in 
all circumstances, to extend his circle. With regard 
to one close associate, he humorously remarked, " And 
no wonder we were friends, for we had once found 
ourselves in a moral quarantine together." 

His remarkable qualities would have enabled him to 
have done far more than he actually accomplished, had 
a great lasting fame been his ambition. A man who 
took such an active interest in men and affairs that he 
went late in life to America and to Egypt, and enjoyed 
in those countries the new scenes and the new people 
with all the zest of youth, a man who had himself 
carried to a dinner party after a horse accident the 
previous week, was a person whose vigorous attach- 
ment to the world commands admiration, if it does 
not inspire imitation. On his seventy-first birthday 
he assisted at an " Apostles' " dinner. There was still 
a group of College contemporaries to be toasted and 
talked over ; Venables, Spedding, Tennyson and 
Trench were all four still alive. A few weeks later he 
was at a wedding party, and, being a little bored at a 
request to propose the health of the bride and bride- 
groom, when he had stipulated he should not be called 
upon, he startled the party by saying in the course of 
his speech : "It would be preposterous in these 
modem days to wish the young couple anything so 
old-fashioned as a long and happy married life ; let 



250 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

us go with the times, and wish them, at all events, a 
well adjusted and equitable separation." Since this 
very unexpected and unconventional epithalamium, 
the fashion of wedding-breakfast speeches seems 
gradually to have fallen into disuse. 

Essentially a man of Clubs, he was the life and soul 
of several, some of which he had founded himself. In 
later days he liked especially to look in at those where 
he was likely to meet rising young politicians, whose 
courtesies always gratified him. ** I like," he said, 
" the attention of young M.P.'s as an old coquette 
does those of the sons of her former lovers. ..." At 
the '* Beefsteak Club," of which he was to the last a 
popular member, he continued with Henry Kemble 
and Charles Brookfield the cordial friendship he had 
commenced with their forbears in the old " Apostle " 
days at Cambridge. 

When the end of his life was at hand and he com- 
menced to complain of being ill, Sir Wemyss Reid, 
struck by his appearance, asked him, " What is the 
matter ? " on which he answered, " Death, that's 
what's the matter with me ; I am going over to the 
majority, and you know I have always preferred the 
minority." Joking until the end, he said to the same 
friend, and when he was suffering severely from the 
fall upon his bedroom floor which ultimately killed 
him, " he had dreamed of being pursued by Mr. 
Gladstone in a hansom cab, and in his struggle to 
escape from him, had fallen from the bed to the floor." 

He, more than any of them, kept up the spirit of 



RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES 251 

the College days of the Cambridge Apostles, and he 
who enjoyed the present so candidly and undis- 
guisedly is he who has left on record that — 

. The Past is ours, 
And we can build a temple of rare thoughts, 
Adorned with all affection's tracery. 
In which to keep from contact vile and rude 
The grace of this incomparable Day. 



CHAPTER XII 

JAMES SPEDDING 

The wind, that beats the mountain, blows 

More softly round the open wold. 
And gently comes the world to those 

That are cast in gentle mould. 

And me this knowledge bolder makes, 
Or else I had not dared to flow 
In these words towards you. 

(Tennyson.) 

It is a testimony to the affectionate esteem in which 
James Spedding was held, as well as to his complacent 
good humour, that each of his intimates had a separate 
sobriquet for him. With Brookfield he was *' Spedding 
the Sublime " ; FitzGerald speaks of him as " Old Jem 
Spedding " and as " My Sheet- Anchor " ; while 
Thackeray entitles him " Jeames Spending " and 
" that aged and most subtile serpent." 

Spedding, an accomplished classical scholar, was an 
" Apostle " of the type dreamed of by the originators 
of the " Society." Heartily respected and beloved by 
his friends within and without that *' body," he had 
the open mind, the wide grasp, the level outlook and 
the accuracy of expression which were the attributes 




Janus ,:^j>(.(iiii/ii^ 

Drawn by himself 



JAMES SPEDDING 253 

of the most illustrious of its members. And though he 
had a strong sense of humour, it was not of the reckless 
and irresponsible kind which always alarmed that earn- 
est sodality. Was he not "the Pope amongst the set," 
according to Tennyson ? and did not the bard further 
confess that he "was rather overawed by Spedding's 
calm personality — and dome"? Spedding, it may be 
mentioned, went bald quite early in life, but his sweet- 
ness of temper permitted him to smile at the bantering 
comments of his contemporaries. He was from his 
boyhood a graceful writer of verse, and he was the 
fifth of this especial set who took the Declamation 
prize. " Spedding," says Monteith, " has just finished 
his prize declamation, which has been greatly praised. 
Alfred Tennyson, talking of it to Whewell, observed, 
"It quite smells of Spedding," to which Whewell 
replied, " A rare good thing to smell of, too." 

When Tennyson left Cambridge, Spedding was one 
of his favoured correspondents, and once he tells him 
how he is " melted by the recollections of intellectual 
evening when we sat smoking," and he asks in the 
same letter, " Is Brooks at Cambridge ? To him I 
owe a letter, and I mean to pay my debt." On another 
occasion he sent him a " sketch to move his heart," 
while Spedding, who had a clever pencil (as well as 
pen), retaliated by drawing the poet en deshabille 
during one of his visits to Spedding's home. The 
picture of himself in this book is one that he did for 
Douglas Heath, a fellow "Apostle." It is not a flatter- 
ing likeness, but in it we see him, at all events, " as he 



254 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

saw himself ." Spedding's parents, " wise, tolerant and 
charitable/' were troubled to find their son so much in 
touch with poets and poetry, and wished, while he was 
at Cambridge, that he would turn his great talents to 
"something better than verse-making." FitzGerald 
thinks that these parents " had seen enough of poets 
in Shelley and Coleridge (perhaps in Wordsworth), 
whom they remembered about the lakes." The home 
of the Speddings was in that picturesque neighbour- 
hood, and, whatever their private sentiments, they 
were kind and hospitable to all the many poets and 
artists who flocked thither. 

He was a great correspondent in those early days, 
and he wrote delightful letters. W. B. Donne was the 
recipient of many of them, written when both their 
lives were fresh and teeming with interest. 

"Trinity College, 

" October 30, 1831. 
" My dear Donne, — 

" * They're a mysterious thing, is a man ! ' said a 
friend of mine the other day, and Solomon used to say 
much the same long ago, and, though I meant not to 
make myself equal with Solomon, so say I now. If I 
were to tell you how many times in solitude, and amid 
the weary fret, unprofitable, etc., in the long vacation, 
my spirit has turned to thee, thou wanderer through 
the world — turned to thee, I am ashamed to say, 
rather to curse thee than otherwise — I fear the staid- 
ness and piety of my character would sink in your 
esteem. Curse thee I did, however, but write as 
much for that I knew not where to write to thee 



JAMES SPEDDING 255 

myself as for that thou wert slow to write to me. 
And yet, here have I gone on for I dare say three good 
weeks of a reforming world, without writing you a 
line, without acknowledging your letter, which came 
at last to comfort me, without executing the distinct 
commission, nor answering the distinct question, for 
which you trusted to me unworthy ! Well ! well ! 
^they're a mysterious thing, is a man,' and that is the 
conclusion of the whole matter. 

" Your question concerning the society you would 
meet with, I can answer fully. In the course of the 
summer I have seen a good deal of various north- 
country friends, and I am not altogether so proud of 
the moral and intellectual being of my countrymen as 
I used to be from old recollections. If I may generalize 
from a few facts, I should say that there is in the 
Cumbrian character great frankness, openness and 
honesty, strong practical sense — a hearty contempt for 
humbug (a comprehensive word and embracing all 
that is deeper as well as all that is shallower than 
current opinion), shrewdness and eagerness of intel- 
lect and much dry humour, but withal a great 
deficiency in depth and patience, and tranquility of 
contemplation, and those finer qualities which you 
will understand much better than I can explain, 
more especially if you will think of the blueness of 
the Archipelago, the name of Italy, and the climate 
of the South of France. This I should take to be the 
character of the gentry of Cumberland, and you will 
perceive that it must suit me much better than it 
would suit you. I question whether you will find any 
men to venerate old orthography, or read Sir T. 
Browne ; certainly you will find none to kiss the 
sacred splinters of Chatterton's box. 

" And now I leave you to draw your own conclusions, 



256 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

engaging to furnish you with any other information 
which you have the grace to write for. The chapel 
bell is ringing ; therefore I will not now enter into 
politics, wherein we somewhat differ. Hallam wishes 
to remind you that it is nine months since he heard 
from you, and yet you have brought forth nothing. 
Hallam furnished the fact ; the indecent allusion, I 
am proud to say, is my own. Tennant desires me to 
say that he has not written to you. Trench is here, 
attending Divinity Lectures and groaning over the 
prospects of mankind ; he has cast down the magni- 
ficent temples of Shelleian religion, and his only hope 
is in a speedy millennium, of which he hails the newly 
given gift of unknown tongues as a forerunner and 
assurance. 

" I was present, with Edward, at the first public 
exposure of this great and growing grace ; Irving is 
an old and very great favourite of mine, and his 
Christianity is after the stamp and spirit of St. Paul. 
But he is no logician, and the errors of a deficient 
though a most confident and ambitious logic are 
sanctified by passing through his burning imagination 
into awful and imposing truths. There was some- 
thing very noble in his earnestness of spirit, and elo- 
quence of the very first order in his exposition. But 
until these new-fangled tongues shall cease, or until 
some miracles shall be manifested which are not 
according to the natural course of things, I think 
I shall not go into his church again, and I grieve 
thereat. But these are high matters. I shall con- 
clude with a small poem which I really think shows 
true poetical power. There is a sequel to it which is 
not so good. I call the two 'Before and After.' Perhaps 
you will recognize in the following lines their original, 
C. Malkin ;— 



JAMES SPEDDING 257 

(I) 

I cannot think that thou wilt die, 

Ever during summer dwelleth 
On thy placid forehead high, 

Thy pure cheek of summer telleth 
Summer sleepeth in thine eye. 

(2) 

Thousand solemn summer sheen 

Shall come and find thee still as now, 

With thy gracious eye serene. 
And thy balmy tress' d brow 

The same as thou hast ever been. 



" I believe I have a right to ask to be remembered 
to Mrs. W. B. Donne. Please give my kindest regards 
to your truly good mother. 

" Yours truly, 

" J. Spedding," 

When Spedding next went into the North himself, 
he was supposed to be much engaged in Wordsworth's 
company, " cigars and the rudiments of German." 
He never agreed with Sterling, who in describing 
Wordsworth, said there was " little of the poet and 
philosopher in the lower part of his face. This 
accounts for the unnecessary trivialities of some of 
his writings, but more than all for The Excursion. '' 

In another of Spedding's letters to W. B. Donne, 
he describes some of his early literary experiments, 
and gives an interesting criticism on Fanny Kemble's 
recently published tragedy — she was only twenty- 
one at that time. 

17— (2318) 



258 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

"Trinity College, 

" April I, 1832. 

My life is full of weary days : 

Yet good things have not kept aloof, 

Nor wandered into other ways : 

I have not lacked thy mild reproof 

Nor golden largess of thy praise. 

Shake hands, my friend, across the brink 
Of that dark grave to which I go : 

Shake hands once more : I cannot sink 
So far, far down, but I shall know 

The voice, and answer from below. 

" Do not suppose that this alludes to any physical 
disease of my own : all at Ely though the cholera be, 
and all in Rose Crescent though it be reported. It is 
only a moral death that I have died ; and not that 
neither, except, as I hope, in your imagination. For 
in truth, oh thou that usedest to write often and be 
written to oftener, my offence is rank and the smell 
of it may be best excused to the delicate sense of your 
epistolary conscience by being supposed to savour of 
the Charnel House. Truly, if you have not believed 

me dead, you must have wished me d d. An 

unfortunate alternative for me, but I will accept either, 
rather than believe that you have not thought me 
worth the damning. Howbeit, I have long repented 
of the wrong I have been doing you, and I am now 
going to requite it. 

Oh ! my gentle Donne, 
We owe thee much : within this wall of flesh 
There is a soul counts thee his creditor, 
And with advantage means to pay thy love. 



JAMES SPEDDING 259 

Which is indeed the reason why I began with those 
same stanzas which I presume you are still feasting 
on in your inmost heart, and not attending to what 
I am now saying, which is also the reason why I write 
so foolishly and repent not. 

" By those two stanzas (they have entered into 
your soul already, so now listen to the words of Mer- 
cury) I conceive I have already made ample requital 
for all past neglect, as well as enriched this parcel to 
the value of carriage ; for whose should they be but the 
great Alfred's, and to whom should they be addressed 
but to the lordly-browed and gracious Hallam ? 
worthy subject of worthy Poet ! You have seen but 
little of the said Hallam, but I know him well and — 

I love his voice, that falls upon my ear 
Like a lonely leaping fountain. 

Eyes of joyful grey, lit up 

With summer lightnings of a soul 
So full of summer warmth, so glad, 

So healthy, clear and sound, and whole. 

" A fragment as you perceive, and to remain a 
fragment, the last lines forming part of a perfect poem 
which you may hereafter see ; and the unworthy sub- 
ject of so exquisite a fragmentbeing com bined with a 
wealthy, portly miller with a double chin and a pretty 
daughter. Guess who ! 

" And now if you deduct the postage of this letter 
and two or three more which I hope to be favoured 
with, you will find that I have not taxed your purse 
unreasonably nor unseasonably with this same parcel. 

" Moreover, as I do not deal in mimic modesty, at 
least not with my familiars, I presume that its other 
contents will not be uninteresting to you. You will 



26o THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

find in it my ' Apology for the Nineteenth Century/ 
a work (as I have told you before, and now beg to 
reassure you) of great fame in these parts, and indeed, 
I may say, the rock on which my name is (for the 
present) built ; my classical and mathematical specu- 
lations having turned up blanks, or not much better. 
You will also find in it the ' substance of a speech, 
etc.,' being a speech spoken and afterwards composed 
by me — observe, by substance of a speech I merely 
mean a speech not as spoken. The publication of the 
same is at the expense and desire of my father, who 
says he can understand it, every word, and rejoices 
therefore. I am not aware that anybody has bought 
it or taken notice of it ; but I think it (not the less, 
but the rather, for that) a good speech, well written, 
and well reasoned, and far too much in the right to 
find any sympathy in the thought and feelings of an 
enlightened public. This feeling, you will observe, 
is, and always has been, part of my philosophy ; and 
what philosopher but would be disquieted with any 
honours which involved the dishonour of a favourite 
theory ? 

'' Yet, again, you will find in it a third composition 
of mine, which points at a fourth, which will, however, 
cost you half a crown, if your idle curiosity should 
prove too strong for your economy and induce you 
to procure it. ' Romeo in Co vent Garden versus 
Romeo in Shakespeare ' is a subject on which you 
are much interested. The history of its composition 
is as follows : There was a certain Englishman's 
Magazine in which Hallam and other friends of mine 
took an interest, and which, claiming as it did to be 
a literary reformer, did thereby claim the interest and 
support of all good and wise men. This opportunity 
of troubling the community with my sentiments on 



JAMES SPEDDING 261 

any subject happened to coincide with certain con- 
ceptions of exceeding disgust at the modern drama, 
which I conceived in the last long -vacation, when I 
was in London, left much to myself, and went now 
and then to see a play, and always came away with a 
headache (an infallible sign of badness as a work of 
art). The modern Romeo and Juliet was a good 
subject to fire off upon, and accordingly I began the 
article of which that I now send you forms the second 
part. I intended to have written only two or three 
pages ; but the exposition of my views of the spirit 
and purpose of dramatic art swelled into a goodly 
article by itself, which was reviewed and acknow- 
ledged by the editor, who thanked me duly by return 
of post, and made use of it in his October number. 
Unfortunately, however, my article possessed every 
quality of greatness in such a degree that the English- 
man's Magazine died in the effort of giving it birth. 

" Wherefore, also, my second part appears in un- 
printed individuality at your service. I have not got 
a copy of the first part to send you. Wherefore, if 
you want it, you must apply through your book- 
seller for the Englishman'' s Magazine for October, 1831, 
at Moxon's, 64, New Bond Street. It will cost you 
half a crown, but contains divers quaint and good 
things besides mine— especially a facetious, but not 
first-rate specimen of Charles Lamb. But in the 
number for August there is not only an admirable 
Elia about Elliston, but also a splendid critique on 
Alfred Tennyson, by Hallam, so you will judge for 
yourself. 

" If you happen to know any publication which 
would take my second part and publish it without 
discretionary alterations, it is very much at their 
service. It is a thing for the day, and will become 



262 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

obsolete in a year or so : and, therefore, though it 
is not worth troubhng oneself about, I would willingly 
pick up any opportunity that might fall in my way. 
But I have no notion of being improved by an editor, 
and therefore I would not give up the MS. on such a 
condition, which said editor would think anything 
but reasonable. However, as I said before, it is not 
worth all this jaw. 

" I have read Fanny Kemble's traged}^ It was so 
magnificently praised in some of the periodicals that 
I began to tremble for the fair fame of my friend's 
sister. But I think the praise was exaggerated, and 
both the merits and defects of the play do her great 
credit. As poetry, it is poetry of a very high order, 
not only in the diction, which throughout is English 
and excellent, and in the separate passages, but the 
whole thing is poetry : the action, the feeling, the 
character all unfold themselves in the true spirit of 
poetry ; they have the genuine swell and fall, the glory 
and repose of art. As a drama, it has very great but 
surely not Shakespearian merit. I perceive, and I 
am glad of it, none of the familiarity with the secrets 
of human passion which is claimed for her. The 
darker passions in her play are only reflected from 
Shakespeare — I do not believe that she is a whit more 
familiar with them than you and I, who know them 
out of the bard of Avon, and Walter Scott, and Don 
Juan and other such books that let one into secrets — 
but as for anything more, we are as innocent as lambs 
unborn. 

" You speak of Trench's metamorphosis ; ay marry! 
but what could you expect of a man who used to be- 
lieve in Shelley ? Did I not tell you that people would 
come round to my opinions concerning that great 
warrer against Customs and Rights and Forms and 



JAMES SPEDDING 263 

* the crust of outworn opinions on which established 
superstitions depend ? ' Blakesley never admits that 
he has changed an opinion^ but he, too, is full of the 
inviolable sanctity of conventionalities. 

*JC «{C !jC *J* t* 

" I am, yours in all purity of utilism, 

" James Spedding." 

" MiREHOUSE, 

" Keswick, 

" October 28, 1834. 
" My dear Donne, — 

" You desired me to ask Southey whether certain 
pictures in your possession would be of use to him in 
his Life of Cowper. I called many weeks ago to execute 
the commission, but he was away, and I have been 
prevented since, partly by my own laziness which 
waxeth, and partly by other things over which I have 
as little control till within the last few days. 

" He will be glad to have the use of them, and will 
write to you about it. I saw him yesterday, and he 
gave me some very strange and interesting in- 
formation about Cowper which he had gathered out 
of certain letters from Newton to Thornton. The 
strangest of all will not be made public. He thinks 
Cowper's letters the most beautiful that ever were 
written. 

" I know that Coleridge is dead, and that De Quincy 
has written reminiscences of him. The article is in 
Tail's Magazine for September and October, but the 
last I have not yet seen. It is powerful and very in- 
teresting, but I am daily more and more convinced 
that nobody ought to publish anything touching living 
men and women without first consulting me. In some 



264 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

parts the article is almost disgusting, by reason of its 
indiscreet prattle about things which should not be 
prattled about at all — least of all in public. The 
parts which relate to Coleridge himself, his habits, 
and powers of thought, are worthy of De Quincy, 
which, from me, is almost as much as need be said. 
What think you of the following as a specimen ? 

'' ' Coleridge, to many people, and often I have heard 
the complaint, seemed to wander ; and he seemed then 
to wander most when in fact his resistance to the 
wandering instinct was greatest, viz. when the com- 
pass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved, 
travelled furthest into remote regions before they 
began to revolve.' 

" This is what I call throwing light upon a thing — 
illuminating counsel by words with knowledge. What 
such a man might do, towards setting mankind right, 
if he would but set about it seriously ! But, alas ! the 
* De emendatione humani intellectus ' is, as it were, an 
aqueduct. See Confessions of an E.O.E. (English 
Opium Eater). 

" I presume that by this time — indeed, long before 
this time — you have received a Latin essay which I 
promised you, and which it will require all your charity 
to excuse. I sent it about three months ago to be 
forwarded to you by Henry Taylor, that famous man 
Philip van Artevelde, who detained it on its passage 
at my suggestion, though contrary to my recommen- 
dation. Have you read P.v.A. ? because if you have, 
you cannot but think his opinion worth a pause ; 
and his opinion is, that so far forth in Utilism as that 
essay goes, everybody must go with me who knows 
the doctrine under all its names, and is not ashamed 
to avow it. I must say I am not a little gratified to 
find myself wandering in such good company, though 

/ 



JAMES SPEDDING 265 

(while I am writing to you) it is but becoming in me 
to admit that I am wandering. 

" Remember me to your household and 

** Believe me, 

" James Spedding." 

This trifling allusion to his lack of a fixed faith is char- 
acteristic of Spedding's singular mental and moral com- 
placency. He seems to have gone through none of the 
qualms and misgivings and agonies of mind which 
wrung the souls of most of his friends. Yet his 
heart was full of love for his fellow-men, and he was 
one to whom others in sorrow turned naturally for 
sympathy and comfort. Mr. Hallam sought his 
assistance when he was contemplating his Memoirs of 
his son. " Spedding," he said, '* will be able to assist 
me better than anybody else." Spedding's apprecia- 
tions both of Arthur and of Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam 
rank high as memorial tributes, and prove, if proof 
were needed, that his heart was as great as his mind. 

In 1835 he entered the Colonial Office ; the following 
few words to Donne relate to his work there : — 

'^February i. 
" My dear Donne, — 

" As usual I have nothing to do but to confess my- 
self no gentleman. 

'' Febnmry 4. What my confessing mood might 
have led me to I do not know, when I was interrupted 
by p. V. Artevelde on public business. As it is, let 
this last put off (No. looi) speak for its brethren that 
have gone to their account before it. 



266 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

" I also have at last got acquainted with Maurice, 
who now officiates at Guy's Hospital, and he quite 
equals my expectations, which were high enough. I 
have seen him three or four times. I fear, however, 
that he will not be able to make a convert of me to a 
purer philosophy. I fancy that if I should ever 
perceive the dramatic profanity of his views — their 
foundation in his nature — it ought to satisfy me. 

" At present I am engaged in an attempt to reduce 
the military expenditure in the West Indies, and 
though it be justly deemed impossible to turn a black 
army white, yet it deserves consideration whether a 
white army may not be turned black ; you will call 
it a niggerly economy, and I hope it may turn out so." 

The following gives an interesting glimpse of Edward 
FitzGerald as well as of Tennyson : — 

" MiREHOUSE, 

June I, 1835. 
" My dear Donne, — 

" One reason for my long silence, and a reason 
sufficient to account for the same, though not to excuse 
it, is that I have mislaid your last letter and cannot 
lay my hands on it anywhere ; which makes me think 
that I must have put it by as a precious thing. People 
tell me always to put things by, and it will save time 
in the end, for then I shall never waste it in looking 
for them. This practice may be good for some people, 
but I have never found it answer. When I leave 
things about or cram them into the next book or 
drawer, I must indeed admit that I cannot always 
find them at once ; but when I have once put a thing 
what I call hy, that is in a proper place, I can never 
find it at all. 



JAMES SPEDDING 267 

" E.F.G." (Edward FitzGerald) "was here for about 
a month, and left us some three weeks ago. He is 
the Prince of Quietists. I reckon myself a quiet man, 
but that is nature, in him it is a principle. Half the 
self-sacrifice, the self-denial, the moral resolution, 
which he exercises to keep himself easy, would amply 
furnish forth a martyr or a missionary. His tran- 
quillity is like a pirated copy of the peace of God. 
Truly he is a most comfortable companion. He would 
have everybody about him as tranquil as himself. 

" Do you know that Deville, the phrenologist, pre- 
dicted of him that he would be given to theology 
and * Religion in the supernatural parts ' ? Was 
there ever so felicitous a mistake ? Was there ever 
a stronger instance of the organs of marvellousness 
and veneration predominant, though driven so effec- 
tually out of their ordinary, if not their natural 
channel ? I take this to be the secret of all that is 
strange and wayward in his judgments on matters of 
art : for very strange and wayward they appear to 
me, though so original and often so profound and 
luminous. 

" There tarried with us at the same time a man 
who is in many points his opposite — a man whom you 
know in the spirit already, and will know in the flesh 
some day, as Scholefield (after St. Paul) says — to wit, 
Alfred Tennyson. His spirit yearns towards your 
character as bodied dimly forth in Apostolic remem- 
brances, and he boldly asserts that he means to get 
acquainted with you. He stayed three weeks, or it 
may be a month, but the sun did not shine to ad- 
vantage, and it must be a very capable and effective 
sun that shall make his soul rejoice and say, * Ha ! ha ! 
I am warm.' 

" I said he was the opposite to Edward FitzGerald, 



268 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

for he is a man always discontented with the Present 
till it has become the Past, and then he yearns towards 
it, and worships it, and not only worships it, but is 
discontented because it is past. 

" But though this habit makes him gruff and 
dyspeptic enough at times, you must understand that 
he is a man of a noble spirit and a tender heart. His 
frailty is that he has not faith enough in his own 
powers, which produces two faults, first that he does 
not give his genius full beat ; and, secondly, that he 
seeks for strength not within but without, accusing 
the baseness of his lot in life and looking to outward 
circumstances far more than a great man ought to 
want of them, and certainly more than they will ever 
bring. 

" What is your opinion touching the wisdom of 
booksellers, considered as a body with a bodily con- 
sciousness ? They have so contrived among them- 
selves that there shall be no complete edition of Cowper 
for these forty-eight years, and then each of the rival 
publishers spends, I suppose, half the profits of his 
edition in advertising against the other. One would 
think they might better, both for themselves and the 
public, have coalesced. Southey does not care ; he 
has a thousand pounds for writing the Life and super- 
intending the edition, which by the way turns out 
to be no such light labour, for he tells me that upon 
examining the MSS. from which Haley printed his 
edition of the Letters, he finds not only that many 
parts have been omitted without any reason, but that 
they are printed very inaccurately all through, and 
require a thorough correction of the press. He 
expects the first volume to be out in two or three 
months. 

" I saw Wordsworth for a few hours not long ago ; 



JAMES SPEDDING 269 

he is very well himself, but troubled with domestic 
sorrows and anxieties. His sister still lingers on, and 
his daughter has been ill for a good while and gets no 
better. 

" Maurice has published a pamphlet entitled Sub- 
scription no Bondage, which I have not yet seen. 
They tell me it does not mean that a man is not bound 
to the opinions he has subscribed to. I am rather 
curious to see so monstrous a birth, the offspring of 
so unnatural a connection as that between the Genius 
of Oxford and the Spirit of an ' Apostle.' 

'* Believe me, whether writing or neglecting to 
write, 

" Ever your affectionate friend, 

" James Spedding." 

Spedding was a favourite subject for his friend 
FitzGerald's banter. He writes for instance, " Sped- 
ding is all the same as ever, not to be improved, one 
of the best sights in London." When he went to 
America with Lord Ashbiurnham, FitzGerald said : 
" Of course you have read the account of Spedding's 
forehead landing in America ; English sailors hailed it 
in the Channel mistaking it for Beachy Head." And 
later on in this visit he mentions that he begins to feel 
sure that Spedding would be safe in America, because 
" to scalp such a forehead was beyond any Indian's 
power." 

When Spedding got back to England, he gave up 
the Colonial Office, and also refused an undersecretary- 
ship which was offered him, mainly on account of his 
enormous business capacity which amounted almost 
to genius. With regard to this, he said " he knew 



270 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

his own deficiencies, and that it was fortunate he was 
by when the decision was taken." A friend said at 
the time, " No one was more fitted to take office, so 
gentle, so luminous, and, in his own quiet way, so 
energetic is he." 

Gladstone was disappointed when Spedding refused 
the post; he thought he was just the man who 
ought to have been persuaded to take it, and he said 
of the existing Civil Service System that "if it had 
brought eminent men into it, it had driven men like 
Manning and Spedding out," and many of Spedding's 
friends also regretted his decision, but it was the 
result of no whim nor idle indisposition for respon- 
sibility. The fact was that Spedding felt the time 
had come for him to renounce all else and devote him- 
self to what he had determined should be his life's 
work — the defence and rehabilitation of Francis Bacon. 

Few men have given up an easy calling in which 
success was sure, as well as a liberal income, in order 
to undertake laborious work certain to prove unre- 
munerative ; but the chivalrous Spedding elected to 
do this for love and never regretted his choice. He 
cheerfully set himself a colossal task, and toiled at it 
for more than thirty years — leading the life of a 
student ; his papers and books about him, a little 
company of rare and delightful friends to break in 
upon him, his magnum opus to fly to and engross him 
during fixed hours as well as in stolen moments. 

Spedding was sociable rather than convivial. He 
was interested in men in spite of his studious habits. 



JAMES SPEDDING 271 

He was a charming host, generous with his introduc- 
tions ; and his rooms were the rendezvous of the choicest 
intellects in London. Tennyson made them his head- 
quarters on many an occasion. It was in them that 
most of " The Gardener's Daughter " and part of the 
" Princess " were written. It was there that Spedding 
introduced Froude to Carlyle, Carlyle to Maurice, 
Thirlwall to Carlyle ; and many were the illustrious 
people that he brought together, and many the important 
friendships formed under his auspices. 
Brookfield said once to his wife : — 

" I opened the envelope of a letter and enclosure 
which appears to be from Mrs. Fanshawe. It was in 
the hurry of opening that which I thought had news 
from you, and which forms a legitimate exception to 
my pedantic habits. I have eaten and drunken with 
Thackeray this morning. I have called on Spedding 
on my way home, who is reading Sartor Resartus by 
me at this moment (but only by way of rest) ; we are 
not going to spend the evening together. Nothing 
whatever has happened since you left except that I 
have read and preached at St. Luke's, and read without 
preaching in bed, and unfitted myself for either preach- 
ing or reading by my meal with Thackeray at noon." 

And again he notes, a few weeks later, when he was 
school-inspecting : — 

" I met a lively, good-natured woman, kind, un- 
affected, who knows Spedding and seemed satisfied 
with anybody who would talk of native Cumberland 
. . . nobody else did I meet but the second master of 
this school whose name suffices — it is Cromwell (but 



272 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

the meekest of men), but the talk of Spedding com- 
pensated." 

While Spedding wrote to him from Cumberland : — 

" For myself I have no news to tell, but that I have 
been stationed here since August, and am in other 
respects much the same as in other places at other 
times, and that I shall probably be in London in the 
course of this month or the next. I hear that the 
' Sterling ' is actually changed into the ' Tuesday ' 
Club. What a convenience for the Record if it be 
still inclined to persecute." 

The following is a humorous reply to a jocular 
query from Brookfield, who was still upon his school- 
inspecting tour : — 

** MiREHOUSE, 

" February 22, 1850. 
" Dear Sir, — 

" I am sure you will attribute my long delay in 
answering your letter of the 2nd inst. to no other 
than the true cause, viz. the difficulty of the questions 
in regard to which you wish for my assistance, and 
my remoteness from the vicinity of extensive libraries, 
by the aid of which I might have prosecuted the re- 
search at once more effectually and more expediently. 
The limited command which my present position 
gives me of books of reference for the purpose of 
classical investigations of the abstruser kinds, entails 
upon me the necessity of personally perusing the 
classical authors to a considerable extent in these 
cases. It is superfluous to remark that such an 
operation must always consume a considerable time, 
without necessarily leading to any satisfactory result. 



JAMES SPEDDING 273 

" The singular expression in the first sentence of 
the extract which you have submitted to me, ' All 
Britons infect themselves with glass,' appears to me to 
admit of only one satisfactory explanation, though this 
explanation involves the assignation to the word 
vitrum of a meaning which, however familiar to an 
English ear, cannot, so far as I am aware, be sup- 
ported by any (other) classical authority. We are to 
remember, however, that the author was writing about 
England, and was probably himself in England at the 
time, so the occurrence of a word in an English sense 
is the less to be wondered at. I conceive that the 
writer, observing the predominance of that kind of 
purple here which drinking induces upon the fair 
complexion of the north, and inquiring (of course 
through an interpreter) what made their faces so 
purple (ccerulejit), received for answer that ' they had 
taken a glass too much,' which in the process of trans- 
lation would easily become ' they had taken too much 
glass,' and thence, in the way of generalization, they 
had infected or stained themselves (i.e. had altered 
their complexions) with glass. If this conjecture be 
adopted, all will be easy, and the sense will be as 
follows, ' All the Britons spoil their complexions with 
drinking, which makes their colour purple ' (which 
we know to be the fact, see Othello) and on this ac- 
count their faces are the more horrible in a fight. 
(Another well known fact, the eyes blackening and the 
face swelling much more when the habit of the body 
is bad — and quite in character with the notorious taste 
of our ancestors for pugilism.) 

" So far all seems clear. But what are we to make 
of capilloque sunt promisso ? What can promised 
hair mean ? Now it is known that baldness is much 
more common in England than in Italy, and that bald- 

18— (2318) 



274 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

ness is always accompanied with the promise (by the 
vendors of bear's grease) of hair. Moreover, Caesar, 
being himself bald, and rather ashamed of it, was no 
doubt familiar with these promises, and may be sup- 
posed to have used the indirect and somewhat playful 
expression, capillus promissus, by way of euphemism, 
in preference to the bare calvities. If this be allowed, I 
would translate the rest of the passage thus, ' The hair 
of the head they are told will come ' (i.e. they have 
no hair on their heads), and they shave every part of 
the body except the head (which is already bare) and 
the upper lip. The truth was that they shaved their 
bodies to show how little they valued hair (which they 
could not have), leaving only a moustache to make 
people think that they might have as much of it as 
they pleased. 

** Hoping that these imperfect suggestions may be 
of use to you in your most interesting and important 
ofhce, 

" I have the honour to remain yours, 

" James Spedding." 

Spedding was from the beginning one of Tennyson's 
warmest admirers and staun chest supporters. His re- 
views of the 1842 Poems did much to advance the Poet's 
reputation and to enhance his friendship for his critic. 

Of his own lighter works, he says he wrote his arti- 
cles and reviews, not because he wanted subject for an 
article, but because an article on the subject was 
wanted at the time. 

Carlyle's enthusiastic disciples all lent him loyal 
support on the occasion of his lectures on German 
literature, and Spedding, with reference to them, wrote 
to Milnes : — 



JAMES SPEDDING 275 

"As it is Carlyle's first essay in this kind it is im- 
portant there should be a respectable number of hearers. 
. . . Learning, taste and nobility are represented by 
Hallam, Rogers and Lansdowne. H. Taylor has pro- 
vided a large proportion of family wit and beauty, and 
I have assisted them to a little Apostlehood. . . . 
Yesterday I dined with Alfred Tennyson at the Cock 
Tavern, Temple Bar. We had two chops, one pickle, 
two cheeses, one pint of stout, one pot of port and three 
cigars. When we had finished I had to take his regrets 
to the Kembles ; he could not go because he had the 
influenza." 

When Brookfield was ill and starting for Madeira, 
Spedding wrote : — 

" October 29, 1851. 
" My dear Brookfield, — 

" I was very glad to see your handwriting, and the 
more when it told me that you were still within reach 
of a line of greeting. For I have been these two or 
three months under the strangest delusions as to your 
whereabouts. About the middle of August, dining 
with a friend and neighbour (Mrs. Brookfield will at 
once understand that I mean John Forster), Mrs. 
Pollock shocked me with information that you were 
going to Italy, all three, the next morning. She had 
heard it from Richmond (she said) to whom Mrs. B. 
had been sitting, and spoke so confidently that I 
thought it useless to go to Cadogan Place to inquire. 
At all other places, as Mortlake (Sir Henry Taylor's), 
Aubrey De Vere's, etc., I made diligent inquiry, but 
could hear nothing about you. So I imagined you to be 
somewhere in the warm sun, moving probably towards 
Rome, but uncertain where, till Lord Monteagle told 
me, two or three days ago, that he had just seen you^ 



276 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

on the point of sailing for Madeira, upon which I 
imagined you already on the seas. (Pity you were 
not, by the way, if the weather at Southampton is 
as wintry as ours is here to-day.) But, however, I 
am glad to know where you are, and to be inquired 
after so kindly. My mishap was hardly worth men- 
tioning, except to account for delays in answering 
letters. I had to be poulticed and to keep quiet for 
a few days, and being in very good quarters I stayed 
where I was a fortnight longer than I meant to do ; 
but I have had no illness or serious injury of any kind, 
and am now as sound as ever, except in one place which 
has not yet perfectly healed. You call it good shoot- 
ing when one gets as many shots as one can desire, 
which was certainly my case on that day — namely, 
eight in my armi, two in my hand, eleven in my back, 
and nine or ten in my thigh — but all ingloriously be- 
hind, and they did me so little harm that I was not 
even interesting. But I had all the other privileges 
of a sick man without any of the sensations — all the 
privileges, I should say, except that of tossing and 
tumbling, for being ordered to be on my back without 
either turning or raising myself, and not to move my 
right leg or arm for fear of disturbing the poultices, it 
was impossible to toss or to express impatience by 
any outward sign, and I happened to be so remark- 
ably well in other respects all the time that I did not 
even feel it much. And Fanny Kemble, who was 
staying at the house, came and read Shakespeare and 
Milton to me, and — but my candle is rapidly giving 
out, and I shall hardly have time to direct and seal. 
Take my best wishes with you — for self and wife — 
into the purple seas, and come back well. 

" I was once within two degrees of Madeira myself, 
and saw the starry heavens there for the first time. 
" Ever yours, James Spedding." 



JAMES SPEDDING 277 

And when Brookfield again asked advice, this time 
upon his reading of the Merchant of Venice, he 
wrote : — 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" I did not think of being asked for criticism, or I 
should have tried to remember the particular points 
that struck me at the time, which I cannot do now, 
though I have looked through the play to see if it 
would recall them. I only remember, in the matter 
of interpretation, that I thought you pronounced the 
word ' sufficient ' (' My meaning is that he is sufficient ') 
as if you did not understand it as I do — namely, a man 
equal to the undertaking ; a ' good ' man in Shylock's 
phrase was a man ' who could do what he undertook,' 
a common meaning of ' sufficient ' then, now obsolete. 
I should throw a stronger emphasis on the word. 

" In general, I do not object to the histrionic, because 
it seemed to me that the parts most acted were the 
best done. Much of the part of Shylock (which only 
wanted the stage and the dress to be complete acting) 
seemed to me admirable. The other parts which were 
less elaborate I did not think nearly so good. So 
telling and effective you, of course, did not mean them 
to be, but I thought they were not so good in their 
kind. Bassanio always seemed to me one of the most 
gentlemanly men in all Shakespeare — no man talks 
more gracefully, easily, unaffectedly, or behaves on all 
occasions more handsomely. Antonio also was surely 
intended by Shakespeare for a kind of model Christian 
merchant of unbounded liberality, tender affections, 
grave and gentle manners. It is true that a Jew was 
a dog in his eyes, just as a Christian is a dog among 
Mahometans — that is to say, Antonio was an orthodox 
Christian, and thought of Jews as all pious Christians 



278 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

then did, and as the ostler at Ware did since the be- 
ginning of the present century. At least the story was 
told, as of a man whom people still remembered, about 
the time I went to Cambridge. I suppose you know 
it \ but if not, this is it as it was told to me, I suppose 
in the summer of 1828. I know it was as we came 
from bathing. * There was a hot opposition between 
two of the Cambridge coaches, which kept the same 
hours ; one of them was driven by a Jew. The 
Christian coach was ahead, but while it was changing 
horses at Ware, the infidel cantered past, upon which 
the ostler — his divinity, it seems, getting the better of his 
humanity — shouted after him at the top of his voice, 

" ' Who crucified our Saviour ? D your blood ! ' " 

So Antonio, when he came to words with Shylock on 
the Rialto, and got angry and excited, treated him as 
a man who had crucified his Saviour and deserved 
to be kicked out of the world. Such conduct was not, 
I fancy, inconsistent with the highest courtesy, gen- 
erosity and modesty in all his dealings with the rest of 
mankind, and Shakespeare could not leave it out, 
without depriving Shylock of the one excuse which 
brings him within the reach of sympathy. I should 
think he rather exaggerated it on that account. For 
such a thirst for revenge excited merely against a rival 
for interfering with his gains, without any higher or 
more plausible ground of offence, would have been 
too odious. In representing the sense of personal 
indignities as inflaming, and the theological quarrel as 
seeming in a manner to sanctify the passion which had 
originally grown out of its selfish motives, Shake- 
speare was, I suppose, quite true to nature. And so 
far, taking Shylock's point of view, one can feel with 
him ; Antonio had given him a right (as indeed Antonio 
himself admits) to treat him as an enemy and use ad- 



JAMES SPEDDING 279 

vantages against him. But I cannot think that our 
sympathy with Shylock was intended to go beyond 
this ; or that it is possible by any art to transfer the 
interest of the spectator to his side of the question, 
without losing all the effect of the trial scene, in which 
we are certainly intended to feel the turning of the 
tables upon him, and the announcement one after 
another of the penalties in which he has involved 
himself, as an appropriate retribution in which we 
heartily sympathize. Now it seemed to me that you 
lost this effect, partly, perhaps, because the clock had 
struck and you had to hurry the scene — an accident 
which I should say you ought always to take effectual 
measures to avoid ; whatever part you have to omit 
or reduce, always leave rosy time and space for the 
closing scene, and as you know exactly how much you 
have to do, it must be easy to arrange it beforehand. 
But chiefly because, by representing everybody who 
came in contact with Shylock as so much less respect- 
able, you di'ew your audience to his side ; in so much 
that I really believe if instead of ' Tarry a little ' and 
what follows you had told us that Antonio was then 
strapped down for the operation, and had made Shylock, 
after touching him with the point of the knife, release 
him and settle a small pension upon him on condition 
that he did not spit at Jews any more, we should have 
thought the practical justice better administered. 
And you produced this effect by making Bassanio talk 
like a supercilious coxcomb and Antonio like a pompous 
brute ; though you will find that they both address 
Shylock with perfect and unaffected politeness, until 
he makes Antonio angry by reviving old quarrels, in 
which it seems probable, even upon Shylock's own 
showing, that he was in the wrong — for he says him- 
self that Antonio's chief offence was the lending money 



28o THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

gratis and so bringing down the rate of usance. Did 
you ever read Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics of 
Women ? I remember thinking her exposition of 
the trial scene and of the effect of Portia's repeated 
attempts to induce Shylock to relent, to be merciful, 
to take the offered compensation, while she still 
allowed him to believe that the law was on his side, 
admirably good and true. It was because she would 
fain have settled it without resorting to the legal 
quibble — which she accordingly kept in reserve until 
his resistance to all moral and reasonable considera- 
tion left him so entirely without excuse in substantial 
justice, that one is glad to see him caught in any kind 
of trap, and rejoices at each successive disclosure of a 
fresh penalty incurred, not because he is a Jew, but 
because he is an inhuman savage. Like the Dean of 
Westminster rejoicing in the destruction of a wasp, 
' it is part of one's hatred of sin.' 

*' This is what principally occurs to me in the way 
of objection to your reading. I don't know whether 
it will be of any use to you — though, if you allow the 
objection, you can have no difficulty in removing it. 
It is only to allow yourself and your audience a little 
Christian sympathy with Antonio and Bassanio, and 
not make them talk in a tone which provokes contempt 
and disgust. 

" As for Sir Roger de Coverley, there is of course a 
great deal in such very fine and reserved humour as 
Addison's, which can hardly be made obvious to a 
chance audience in the days of Punch, not to say 
Dickens. But as far as I could judge from the faces 
I saw about me on Wednesday night, and the sounds 
I heard, I should say that your readings from the 
Spectator told very well. And they would have told 
better if it had not been for a general feeling that 



JAMES SPEDDING 281 

time was up and you were in a hurry. In my own 
case, at least, I always find that consciousness of the 
progress of the clock naturally interferes with the 
enjoyment of listening, even when I am in no hurry 
myself. And I suppose you could easily prevent this 
inconvenience by ascertaining beforehand, how many 
minutes it takes to read how many lines, and arrang- 
ing your extracts accordingly. 

" Yours ever, 

" James Spedding. 
" 60, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 

" 1st Sabbath in April, 1859." 

Spedding was remarkably handsome ; even late in 
life his clean-cut features and noble countenance were 
beautiful. He had a musical voice which he never 
raised above its ordinary pitch, and a ready and 
winning smile. Lady Ashburton used to say : "I 
always feel a kind of average between myself and any 
other person I am talking with — between us two, I 
mean — so that when I am talking to Spedding I am 
unutterably foolish and beyond permission." He was 
one of the regular Bath House party — Lord and Lady 
Ashburton, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, Mr. and Mrs. Brook- 
field, Milnes and Spedding. 

He was an enthusiastic archer ; he practised archery 
to the end of his days, and had a mediaeval belief in 
the value of the bow as a weapon. At a dinner party 
during the Franco-Prussian War, he stated with grave 
conviction that " he believed a company of archers 
would more than hold their own in modern warfare." 

It was Spedding who said of Brookfield, " In him 



282 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

a new and original form of genius was revealed to me." 
The two remained to the last excellent friends, and 
Brookfield was frequently the life and soul of Spedding's 
cheery parties. Venables said of these assemblies and 
of these meetings : " One of the few survivors may be 
pardoned for retaining, after fifty years, the opinion of 
prejudice that the society in which Spedding and his 
Cambridge friends then lived, was extraordinarily in- 
teresting and genial." The same gentleman said of 
Spedding's views, " He is a regular Utilitarian and a 
scrupulously chaste writer." 

Of his great work it was said that it was an " un- 
surpassable model of thorough and scholarlike editing." 
He had undoubtedly " perfect style and penetrating 
judgment," though of himself he said, ** that he got 
undeserved credit for knowledge, because no one 
would believe that such a man could be so profoundly 
ignorant." Venables vowed that the plan of Carlyle's 
" Cromwell," even to the typographical arrangements 
of it, was borrowed from Spedding, and that Spedding's 
powers of sustained labour have rarely been surpassed in 
any man. While FitzGerald, who could on occasion 
call the gifted student a " shy beast," said ** Spedding 
was the wisest man I have ever known and not the 
less so for the plenty of the boy in him." 



CHAPTER XIII 

JOHN STERLING 

You might have won the poet's name. 
If such be worth the winning now, 
And gained a laurel for your brow 
Of sounder leaf than I can claim. 

(Alfred Tennyson.) 

For still the thought of things gone by 
Relieves of pain the lingering sigh 

We give to former woe. 
And fills with finer joy the sense 
Of happiness that, once intense. 

Has now a starry glow. 

(John Sterling.) 

For an ill-built vessel no sea is smooth and no wind fair. 

{Ibid.) 

John Sterling has left upon mankind as great an im- 
pression of brilliant genius and forceful power as if 
he had attained the highest limits that intellectual and 
imaginative thought could reach ; and this not so 
much owing to Carlyle's fine life of him as to a vivid 
and vigorous personality which invariably penetrated, 
although it did not always please. 

When he arrived at Cambridge, this striking in- 
dividuality made itself felt ; it influenced all whom he 
met, and also drew to him all those he wished to 



284 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

attract. Maurice was the only one who hung back, 
but his hesitation was not for long. He was soon glad 
to avail himself of the friendship and support of 
Sterling's stronger nature. The two young men had 
much in common, great brains, fine ambitions, splendid 
gifts. But Sterling had by far the more aggressive 
nature. His cry was, " God is not in His heaven, all's 
wrong with the world " ; while Maurice would sigh, 
*' God is somewhere; would that I could find where ! " 

Their mutual influence was beneficial to neither. 
Without Sterling, Maurice would sooner have found 
his ideal and been the happier ; without Maurice, 
Sterling would have been the happier, having found 
nothing. 

Sterling, in a short time, became naturally absorbed 
by the " Apostles." In the " Society " his phenomenal 
eloquence electrified every one, and sometimes caused 
him to influence when he had only meant to interest. 
He took up various Cambridge abuses and scathingly 
denounced them. Merivale says, '' His vehement 
oratory carried our youthful judgments away with it, 
and I dare not say that the influence he exercised over 
us was very justly earned." In his extraordinary 
conversational powers Sterling was equalled only by 
Charles BuUer, who never touched him in debate, great 
as were his own oratorical gifts. In due course he 
followed Maurice to Trinity Hall. Like several of his 
contemporaries, he achieved no great University distinc- 
tion ; the minds of this gifted group were of too wide 
a gauge to run along academic grooves ; some of the 




^ 



^m 



John Sterling 

O 



JOHN STERLING 285 

most brilliant of them took no honours and some left 
without even an ordinary degree. 

When Trench came up — Trench who later on entered 
with him so enthusiastically into the Spanish plot — a 
friendship was formed which lasted long after Ster- 
ling's breach with the Church. Sterling had fine 
generous instincts, and appreciation for the talents of 
others ; and he and Maurice introduced Trench to the 
" Society." It was then that this batch of the 
" Apostles " went through their worst mental pertur- 
bations. Trench was the first to get back into his 
proper course, and he was soon followed by Blakesley, 
then by Kemble ; but Sterling and Maurice deviated 
for many a year, if indeed they ever regained their 
true orbit. Sterling wrote to Trench early in their 
friendship, '' Pray let me see you as soon as you reach 
London, and in the meantime commend me to the 
brethren, who, I trust, are waxing daily in religion and 
radicalism." 

His interest in the " Apostles " was always keen. 
When he left Cambridge he said to Trench : — 

" Any information about things in general, that 
any of my Cambridge friends would take the trouble 
of sending me would be received with humble grati- 
tude, more especially any notices touching the Union, 
the Essayists, or the " Apostles." For the last-named 
body, I fear that since the departure of last year's 
men, the salt of the earth must in some degree 
have lost its savour, though I have no doubt that 
Sunderland still contrives to keep you all in a pretty 
pickle. You may assure the three venerable societies 



286 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

— the trois regnes de la Nature — that I am with them 
in spirit. I have been present in body at several of 
the debates of the London Debating Society ; I have 
spoken once or twice, but it won't do. ' Pearls before, 
etc' Just do consider the martyrdom to which 
great and good men are exposed. I was going to be 
stoned with stones for being an enemy to religion, 
and now I am ground to powder by a mill in London 
for excessive piety." 

As soon as Sterling was settled in London, he gave 
himself up to literature, thinking that the one- voiced 
Reviewer was perhaps the champion whose patriotic 
and wide-souled views should right the world. But 
his attacks upon authority and existing institutions 
failed to strike the popular note and lost him many 
friends. 

Blakesley, who, like Trench, possessed a calm critical 
faculty, wrote to Tennyson with regard to some of 
the adverse comments on Sterling : — 

" Sterling and all of his class who have been hawked 
at by the mousing owls of Cambridge, suffer from the 
narrow-mindedness of criticism. He saw the abuses 
of the present system of things, which is upheld by 
the strong hand of power and custom, and he attacked 
them accordingly. For this conduct he was dubbed a 
radical. He soon saw that the reforms proposed by 
that party were totally inadequate to the end which 
they proposed : that if carried to their fullest effect 
they would only remove the symptoms and not the 
cause of evil, that this cause was the selfish spirit 
which pervades the whole frame of society at present, 
and that to counterbalance the effects the cause of 



JOHN STERLING 287 

them must be removed. This end he at first probably 
thought, with Shelley, might be effected by lopping 
off those institutions in which that selfish spirit ex- 
hibits itself, without any more effort. He afterwards 
saw, with Wordsworth, that this was not the true 
method, but that we must implant another principle 
with which selfishness cannot co-exist, and trust that 
this plant as it grows up will absorb the nourishment 
of the weed, in which case those wickednesses and 
miseries, which are only the forms in which the latter 
develops itself, will of their own accord die away, as 
soon as their principle of vegetation is withered and 
dried up." 

With Sterling's splendid gifts it was a thousand 
pities that his father's affairs should have become so 
flourishing as to allow the son^absolute independence : 
to enable him to follow his inclinations, and become 
a free lance, instead of having to earn his pay under 
the banner of some responsible leader who would have 
curbed his turbulent spirit and checked him from 
tilting at windmills. As it was, however, the hot- 
headed reformer, eager to fight for freedom, joined 
forces with Maurice, and together they took over the 
publication and the editorship of the Athenceum. 
Sterling, already in sympathy with the grievances of 
the Spanish refugees, wrote on their behalf many an 
eloquent article in that review. But it is dangerous 
to coquette with a cause \ as appetite comes with 
eating, so does enthusiasm wax with pleading. When 
Sterling first determined chivalrously to espouse the 
cause of the exiles, he little dreamt how close and in- 



288 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

timate his union with them was destined to become ; 
that the raid into their own country, about which they 
whispered at first as of remote possibiHty, was to be 
the great event of his hfe, on which all his mind was 
to be set, into which all his energies were to be thrown, 
through which he was to experience all the greater 
emotions, hope, joy, ambition and finally disappoint- 
ment. 

A band of refugees, driven from Spain after the 
destruction of the Spanish Royal Constitution in 1823, 
had settled in London. Amongst them were many of 
noble character, if of a misguided enthusiasm, and 
these were they who stirred Sterling, Kemble, Trench, 
Hallam and Spedding to such great depths. Carlyle 
graphically describes them : — 

" Daily in the cold spring air, under skies so unlike 
their own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred 
stately tragic figures in proud threadbare cloaks, per- 
ambulating, mostly with closed lips, the broad pave- 
ments of Euston Square and the region about St. 
Pancras' New Church. . . . This group of Spanish 
Exiles was the Trocadero swarm thrown off in 1823, 
in the Risgo and Ouirogas quarrel. These were they 
whom Charles Tenth had, by sheer force, driven from 
their Constitutionalisms and their Trocadero fortresses. 
. . . the acknowledged chief was General Torrijos, a 
man of high qualities and fortunes, still in the vigour 
of his years and in these desperate circumstances re- 
fusing to despair." 

Sterling was intimately acquainted with Torrijos, 
the leader of his countrymen here in England, who. 



JOHN STERLING 289 

it was hoped, would one day conduct the group in 
triumph back again to Spain, there to upset the new 
dynasty and re-estabUsh the old. He had met him 
while he was still at Cambridge, and had conceived 
an affection for the man and an interest in his ambitions. 
When he came to London he took up the cudgels for 
the refugees, and advocated their cause whenever he 
could. He made his friends take lessons from them 
in Spanish ; he organized charitable fetes in order to 
assist them to live, and he helped them with his money 
as well as with his partisanship. More, as Cambridge 
friends came " down," they were introduced to the 
Spaniards and enlisted, first as pupils in the language, 
then as devotees to the " cause." How many an 
evening must have seen Hallam and Kemble, and 
others of them, arm in arm walking the route from 
Regent Street to Wimpole Street, bright-eyed with 
interest, earnest with anticipation, talking in a chorus 
of praise of Torrijos, the romantic champion of free- 
dom, their hero — their idol. It is sure that the 
principles of liberty, for which alone they thought he 
worked, fired them far more than did his programme. 
Milnes maintained throughout that the tendency of 
the ^' Apostles' " politics was in a totally opposite direc- 
tion to that of the Spaniards. 

The exiles, fired by the enthusiasm they had created 
in these noble minds, in 1829 began to have greater 
yearnings for a return to Spain and to commence to 
prepare the ground over there for their re-entry. 

That they did not do this skilfully is evident, for they 
19— (2318) 



290 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

soon discovered that " Torrijos had been suddenly and 
without cause assigned, struck off the Hst of refugees 
who receive pensions from the Government — no doubt 
in consequence of representations made by the Spanish 
authorities." Combined with annoyance at new poh- 
tical movem.ents in Spain, this act so worked on the 
exiles that at a solemn meeting in Sterling's rooms they 
decided that now was the moment to strike, and that 
if they failed while striking, death was preferable to 
their present position. Accordingly, a programme was 
evolved. It was hoped that if Torrijos were only once 
able to land in the South of Spain with a band of 
patriotic followers, that '' inflammable Spain, then 
groaning under another tyrant, Ferdinand VII, would 
fly to their assistance and a great victory be won." 
Carlyle says of this scheme : '' Considering Somers 
Town (where most of the exiles lived) and considering 
Spain, the terrible chance was worth trying : that this 
big game of Fate, go how it might, was one which the 
omens credibly declared Torrijos and those poor 
Spaniards ought to play." 

Sterling, in this apparently propitious moment, was 
brought to remember a cousin of his, Robert Boyd, a 
gentleman who had just given up his commission in 
the Indian Army, and who had lately received a 
legacy of £5,000. To this young man he proposed 
by letter that he should buy an old royal gun-boat 
which was then going cheap, refit it, man it, and go 
" a-privateering.' Boyd paused a little, but being of a 
romantic disposition came over from Ireland in order 



JOHN STERLING 291 

to talk over this and other adventurous schemes, 
and in John Sterhng's rooms he was caught and 
lost. 

Introduced to Torrijos and his adoring crowd, and 
carried away by the general enthusiasm, he one night 
boasted of his gun-boat lying idle in an Irish creek ; 
whereupon Sterling said to him, " If you want an 
adventure of the sea-king sort, and propose to lay your 
money and your life into such a game, here is Torrijos 
and Spain at his back." Boyd and Torrijos quickly 
came to terms. Boyd was promised many things — 
" a colonelcy in a Spanish regiment " amongst others. 
He was to get a ship into the Thames, then gradually 
and secretly arm and provision it. Torrijos and fifty 
picked Spaniards were to get to Deal without causing 
comment or raising alarm, and there complete their 
plans for the landing in Spain and stir up those likely 
to be useful to them. The ship when ready was to 
take them up and sail away to Spain and victory. 
Boyd's little fortune it was that provided the financial 
sinews for this great scheme, but Sterling, Hallam, 
Spedding and Kemble gave all that they could and 
made strenuous efforts to get more, achieving in this 
a fair amount of success. Not content with giving and 
getting money, certain of them in their zeal determined 
to take part in the fray themselves as " democratic 
volunteers and soldiers of progress." 

The plot was worked in grim and steady earnest. 
Sterling was so absorbed by it that he was rarely seen ; 
and he felt the weight of his increased responsibility. 



292 ' THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

He wrote to Trench, who was then travelling in Spain, 
though not upon this business : — 

** I often feel that in the last six months I have 
worn out ten years of existence. I sometimes begin 
to think and hope of things distant. But all my 
Guadalquivirs turn out muddy ditches, and I have no 
visions of Murillo, or tranquil and solemn aisles of 
meditation to console me." 

But willing, ready, eager as Sterling was to accompany 
the expedition, to his bitter disappointment, at the 
very last moment — just as he had made all his pre- 
parations — his health broke down completely. He 
had never been physically robust, and under the 
tremendous strain, bodily as well as mental, to which 
in his loyalty to the cause he had exposed his constitu- 
tion, the real condition of his health became apparent. 
The doctors pronounced him to be in a consumption, 
and positively forbade him to take any further active 
part in the expedition. He was compelled reluctantly 
to yield to this force majeure, and agree to stay behind 
to manage the correspondence and to collect funds. 

And after this another calamity befell the scheme. 
Everything necessary had been got together and with 
secrecy and precision ; the conspirators were waiting 
at Deal, and the ship was ready to sail ; Sterling, loath 
to let the vessel weigh anchor without him, was wist- 
fully superintending the final preparations for a start, 
when the Thames police came on board and declared 
the boat seized and embargoed in the King's name ! 



JOHN STERLING 293 

Sterling barely saved himself. That same night he 
posted down to Deal and broke the news that there 
was now no chance of exit by the Thames ; but to 
encourage the conspirators, despite the delicate state 
of his health, he then and there took Torrijos in an 
open fishing boat across the channel and landed him 
at St. Valery ; whence that gentleman, by various 
curious routes, got finally to Gibraltar, whither his 
Spaniards, disbanded, unarmed, but not dismayed, went 
one by one to join him. 

Sterling went back to London, disappointed and 
disheartened. But, luckily, throughout this trying 
period he was fortified by the love and sympathy of 
the noble-hearted girl who afterwards became his 
wife. Miss Barton, the sister of Charles Barton, an 
" Apostle." She it was who saved him from despair 
and stimulated him to renewed efforts in the cause to 
which she knew him to be devoted. In June, 1830, 
his " Apostle " friends set about to do their part to 
help him and his conspiracy. Trench and Kemble 
left London by different routes and on different dates, 
but sailed by the same ship from Portsmouth, reaching 
Gibraltar together, with money, with news, with in- 
structions and with encouragement for the exiles, 
with whom they awaited the next shake of the dice- 
box. In July, Hallam and Tennyson went off to the 
Pyrenees with letters in cypher and with money for 
Torrijos' confederates, but to these there came dis- 
illusion. Hallam, who had to deliver certain cypher 
messages, as well as his own pocket money and moneys 



294 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

collected from friends, discovered that Ojeda, the chief 
of the conspiracy working in the north, was jealous of 
Torrijos working in the south ; and his young ideals (he 
was just nineteen) were shattered ! His horror that so 
sordid a sentiment should enter into so noble an enter- 
prise was excessive ; and this, as much as the prolonged 
dragging on of the business, finally sent him and 
Tennyson back again to England. Hallam, full of 
anxiety, still wrote constantly to Trench and Kemble. 
Once he said : — 

" I know not whether Blakesley has told you any- 
thing about the Tennysons. Alfred went, as you 
know, with me to the South of France, and a wild 
bustling time we had of it. I played my part as 
conspirator in a small way, and made friends with two 
or three gallant men, who have been since trying their 
luck with Valdes. I found too many signs of that 
accursed jealousy which has since broken out ; and a 
certain friend of yours was looked upon with no very 
amicable eyes. La Fayette I was delighted with. 
Kemble's anti-gallican propensities may be damned ; 
there is sterling stuff in that man. I must bid fare- 
well. God of His mercy preserve you both. Pray 
remember me most earnestly to Kemble, and think 
of me as one who sympathizes heart and soul in your 
cause, but who strongly doubts, or rather altogether 
disbelieves, the practicability of success, and would 
therefore fain have you back again in old England and 
old Cambridge." 

There now ensued a period of hopes and fears for 
all the home sympathizers — especially for Sterling. 



JOHN STERLING 295 

The waiting was long — nearly two years is long for 
the young — and at last their hopes weakened and died, 
while their fears for the safety of their friends — ^Trench, 
Kemble, Boyd, and poor picturesque Torrijos — 
strengthened, and haunted them perpetually. Kemble 
and Trench saw grand coups fail and were in daily 
danger ; indeed they carried their lives in their hands. 
Though they felt they could no longer be of much 
service to the cause, they stayed loyally on so long as 
there remained any cause to serve. 

Nothing is more painfully pathetic and dramatic 
than Trench's letter, in which he tells how they are 
now at a crucial point, awaiting success or failure — that 
he will leave the letter open for result — then, that the 
result is failure ! 

Trench returned, as we know, some time before 
Kemble, for whose safety he and Hallam continued to 
suffer acutely, and concerning whose fate Hallam was 
sometimes in despair. He wrote to Trench soon after 
his arrival in England : " You have failed in your 
purpose, and after enduring the fever and turbulence 
of the means, you have missed that end which might 
have given you actual peace and satisfied retrospection. 
Well, you have not laboured in vain, although Spain 
is, to use Kemble's expression, * willingly and exultingly 
enslaved.' ... I am grieved that Kemble is not with 
you. He waits you say until the end. What further 
end, in the name of wonder, can there be ? " 

But Sterling's distress was the most severe of all. 
In spite of his engagement and his marriage, the years 



296 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

1830 and 1831 were, without doubt, the most unhappy 
of his Hfe. Although we find " One John Sterling is 
to be married on Tuesday next and will bring his 
glorious bride to Oxford for a few days," it was a time 
of such discouragement and uncertainty for him, that 
notwithstanding Maurice's unfailing sympathy his 
health failed so signally that he presently went away 
to the island of St. Vincent, where he had some pro- 
perty, and where it was hoped that change of climate 
might heal his body and change of scene restore his 
spirits. 

Events presently culminated in Spain. The English 
governor at Gibraltar behaved handsomely to the 
conspirators until the time came when it was considered 
that his harbouring them looked like a menace to a 
friendly power, after which Torrijos and his men 
were courteously offered passports and British pro- 
tection in any other country but Spain. But these 
they refused, Torrijos saying only that he would soon 
leave Gibraltar, and peacefully. He did go soon, 
Boyd, the only Englishman left to the *' cause," going 
with him ; and with them their fifty faithful com- 
panions. In secrecy they embarked in two small 
vessels ; no one knew when they went or whither they 
were bound ; but their silent flight alarmed the Spanish 
authorities, who had them followed by two large 
cruisers. They were sighted in the distance, and the 
bigger boats soon overtook the smaller. " It was a 
hunt, not a race," and Torrijos, unable to reach 
Malaga, the port for which he was bound, put in at 



JOHN STERLING 297 

Fuengirola, advanced inland, took possession of a 
farm, barricaded himself within it, and was at once 
surrounded. He demanded to treat but was refused, 
and was at last compelled to surrender. 

All were made prisoners. Advice was demanded 
from Madrid. It came swiftly, " Military execution 
on the instant. Give them shriving if they want it — 
that done, fusillade them all." It was done. They were 
shot — Boyd and all — and their fate might easily have 
been the fate of Trench and Kemble, Hallam and 
Tennyson ! 

That this catastrophe cast a gloom over the life of 
Sterling is not surprising. He wrote to his brother, 
" I can hear the sound of that musketry ; it is as if 
the bullets were tearing my own brain." 

The dreadful issue of this undertaking, the death 
of his cousin, of Torrijos, and many others whom he 
had known so closely and so intimately, caused him 
such self-reproach that to the end of his life he would 
never have the subject mentioned ; while the effect of 
this disappointment and shock was upon him for his 
remaining years. Whether it were the trials concern- 
ing Spain, or the terrific upheaval of nature during the 
great tornado at St. Vincent, or the birth of his child- 
he himself says this last was the factor which most 
influenced him — the idea came and grew in Sterling's 
mind that he might find peace in holy orders, and he 
determined to be ordained. This decision much sur- 
prised and excited his friends ; and though most of 
them were doubtful of such a development in so 



298 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

reactionary a nature, all rejoiced, and especially Trench 
and Maurice. 

But his shattered health and hopes had evidently 
somewhat weakened his old self-confidence. He re- 
cognized in his soul the want of a settled theology, and 
planned to go to a German University and study ; 
he also eagerly re-read the works of the modern philo- 
sophers who had so perturbed his mind in earlier days, 
and again he was swayed by each in turn ; then he 
re-studied the Koran, and even when he had arrived 
at what appeared to him a goal, he wrote : — 

" I am satisfied of nothing more entirely than of 
the necessity for a great crisis in the belief of England, 
which will indeed destroy Socialism and Sectarianism, 
but will just as certainly shake off the Thirty-nine Articles. 
... If I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel 
Wilberforce and their fellows would reorganize and 
reanimate the Church and nation, or that their own 
minds could continue progressive without becoming 
revolutionary, I think I could willingly wrap my head 
in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of 
protest against aught that is." 

Ordained deacon in 1831, he very soon declared he 
could not bear the "anxiety of deacon's duty," and he 
became more and more unsettled until he decided he 
would go on no further in the Church. Carlyle thought 
if Sterling had gone into the German University at 
the time he thought of it, and stayed there the two 
years he proposed, that much in him that was rough 
would have been made smooth, and that his whole 



JOHN STERLING 299 

mind might have become more evenly poised. Carlyle 
also ascribes Sterling's eight months in the Church, 
" this clerical aberration," to Coleridge. " Had there 
been no Coleridge, . . . neither had this been, nor 
English Puseyism or some other strange enough 
universal portents been." And he describes Sterling 
as he saw him once : — 

" A loose, careless-looking, thin figure, in careless 
dim costume, sat, in a lounging posture, carelessly and 
copiously talking. I was struck with the kindly but 
restless swift-glancing eyes, which looked as if the 
spirits were all out coursing like a pack of merry eager 
beagles, beating every bush ; the brow, rather sloping 
in form, was not of imposing character ; though again 
the head was longish, which is always the best sign of 
intellect ; the physiognomy in general indicated anima- 
tion rather than strength." 

John Sterling so loved work that he at one time 
wished " for a sprain that he might have time to read 
and speculate a little." He had the great mental 
vigour which so often accompanies the consumptive 
disposition. Intellectual employment was necessary 
to him ; and when he was not originating he was 
criticizing. In signing his articles in Blackwood 
" S.S.S." he said he did it for the pleasure it would give 
so many people to turn the first S into an "A." 

His short whimsical compositions are still fresh and 
fantastic, but his longer efforts, such as the Onyx 
Ring, are old-fashioned and flat, though all bear the 
impression of power and individuality. His work is 



300 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

too dogmatic in flavour to be popular. His critical 
essays are exceptionally fine and valuable as allying 
clear insight with honesty of purpose. His starthng 
article upon Tennyson is unique for its alternations of 
praise and blame ; he could even convey the two in one 
short paragraph, as when he says, " Emotion, the 
most general and obvious, the necessary impulse of all 
poetry in every age, is restrained in all his writings by 
the awful presence of self-centred will. ... It is 
clear that his feelings are always strictly watched by 
his meditative conscience, too strictly, not for wisdom 
but for rapture." 

Not having himself the " meditative conscience " he 
scarcely knew when he was abusing his friends, but 
his praise was wide and generous. " I have been 
reading again some of Alfred Tennyson's second 
volume, and with profound admiration of his truly 
lyric and idyllic genius, there seems to me to have 
been more power in Keats, that fiery, beautiful meteor ; 
but they are two most true and great poets." 

His, as Carlyle calls them, "habits of literature" 
were never settled and never of much use to him. 
This may have been due to the restless life necessitated 
by his ill-health. The public did not care particularly 
for his works ; all through his career his personality 
seems to have been his principal charm. As a poet 
he had the heartiest admiration of Tennyson who was 
thinking of Sterling when he wrote : " You might 
have won the poet's name." Sterling himself liked 
his own poems, for he said : "Of all my contemporary 



JOHN STERLING 301 

friends, I am not aware that there is one who thinks 
me entitled to write verses, except Trench, and I know 
there is a great presumption in favour of their judg- 
ment, but I turn so spontaneously and joyously to this 
mode of expression that I am loath to relinquish it." 

Once he said, " On the whole, poetry is well-nigh 
dead among us : it counts for nothing among the 
great^working forces of the age," and he adds that " an 
Oxford man, a Mr. Faber, was the only one who showed 
any true poetic feeling." " I have had a most cordial 
letter from Emerson, thanking me for my poems. 
They must improve much in a voyage over the Atlantic, 
for he writes of them in a way quite unlike any other 
eulogies that have reached me." 

In order to meet his friends when in London on 
business connected with literature, " a small select 
number of people whom it would be nice to meet and 
to whom it would be pleasant to talk," he founded a club 
in 1838, when he was living at Blackheath. James 
Spedding was secretary, and early in its career he writes 
to Donne : — 

" Sterling has been endeavouring to get up a Club 
which is to exist for the purpose of dining together 
once a month. The dinner is to be cheap, the attend- 
ance not compulsory, the day and the place fixed, and 
the members chosen unanimously from the witty, the 
worthy, the wise and the inspired — and it is hoped 
that the Society will sooner or later combine within 
itself as much of the wit, worth, wisdom and inspira- 
tion of the age as can live together in Apostolic 
harmony. 



302 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

" Being able to agree upon no name at all, we 
christened ourselves for the present Anonymous. 
Being unable to fix upon a place, it was left to me to 
make inquiries, and I have fixed for the present upon 
Wills' Coffee House, which stands conveniently near 
to my rooms. 

" The Society consists at present of the following 
names : — 

Bingham Baring, Hon. W. 

Blakesley (Apostle). 

Boxall, W. (Painter). 

Carlyle, T. (French Revolution). 

Colville (Trinity man of my standing. Apostle). 

W. Donne (Old Platonic clergyman — friend of 
Sterling's ; refused bishopric). 

Eastlake, C. L. (Painter). 

Elliott (capital fellow, Emigration Agent General). 

Copley Fielding (Painter). 

Hare, Rev. J. G. 

Douglas Heath (Apostle). 

H. Lushington (Apostle). 

Lord Lyttelton (clever young man, with a mind 
of his own, senior medallist). 

Macarthy (Roman Catholic). 

Maiden (History of Rome in L.U.K.) 

Mill, John. 

Milnes, R. M. (Apostle). 

Monteith, R. (Apostle ; candidate for Glasgow, 
splendid fellow). 

Spedding (secretary and orderer of dinner, 
Apostle). 

Sterling (Apostle). 

A. Tennyson (Apostle). 

Thompson, Rev. W. H. (Apostle). 

Venables, G. S. (Apostle). ^ 



JOHN STERLING 303 

Wood, Samuel (Newmanite). 

Worsley (Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge). 

" In addition to these it was proposed last meeting 
to invite the following gents to become members : — 
W. B. Donne (Apostle). 
George Cornwall Lewis. 
Stafford O'Brien. 
Sir F. Palgrave. 
Rio (Kemble). 
Thirlwall (Apostle). 
Allan Cunningham. 
Alexander Ellice. 
R. Trench (Apostle). 
Sir Edmund Head. 
Richard Cavendish. 

'' The meetings are to happen on the last Tuesday 
in each month. The dinner to cost only 7s. a head. 
No forfeits for non-attendance, but notice of intention 
to attend to be given the day before. Members may 
be proposed and elected next Tuesday without notice 
and by acclamation. But no election to take place 
afterwards except by ballot (a single blackball to 
exclude) except notice has been given the previous 
meeting and except in January and the five following 
months. 

" How say you — will you be of us ? 

" I have concluded abruptly. But silence, accord- 
ing to Carlyle, includes all things that are not uttered, 
and is therefore much richer than speech. Think of 
all I have not said and this letter will supply you with 
much profitable meditation." 

Blakesley, working with Spedding, said when he was 
commissioned to get members, " Two have taken the 



304 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

shilling with great alacrity, viz. Lyttelton and Field- 
ing." Maurice refused, but joined after. The name 
of the Club was soon changed from "Anonymous " to the 
" Sterling " ; but when, by and by, it was supposed 
that the opinions of its members had become too 
strong, and the indignant Record had implied that all 
who belonged to it were infidels, it was changedfagain. 
Maurice said concerning the Record and that trying time, 
" What do you think is the last charge ? that three 
Wilberforces, Manning, Allen, Julius Hare, three 
writers in Punch, Trench and I, belong to a Club 
established in honour of Sterling," and he goes on to 
say that when Sterling thought his own views had become 
what might be considered offensive he had wished some 
other name to be adopted, but that his friends had 
unanimously said as the meetings were strictly private 
and they only connected with the Club by private 
sentiments towards himself, they would not have 
its title altered. Brookfield, of this event, says to his 
mother : — 

" You ask me * what the advocates for the Sterling 
Club say,' etc. I should think they spare themselves 
the trouble of saying anything at all. I do not know 
anything less likely to make them uneasy than the 
spite of the Record, which I have heard of but not seen. 
That the Bishop of Oxford said grace the only time I 
happen to know of his being there, I can answer for, 
and could repeat the words. I perceive on looking at 
the list that the last dinner for 1849 stands fixed for 
December 25, simply because the secretary has taken 
his pocket book and put down the date of each last 



JOHN STERLING 305 

Tuesday in the month (the dining day) and inad- 
vertently put December 25 with the rest, not remem- 
bering that it would be Christmas Day, which cer- 
tainly would not have been appointed, if for no other 
reason than that everybody dines somewhere else if he 
has the luck on that day. But certainly it would per- 
plex yourself or anybody else to find any law, human 
or divine, written or customary, which could make it 
desecration for a Club to dine on that day if they were 
so disposed — which for domestic reasons I should 
think no Club is. As for there being any Infidels in 
the Club, I should think that in a society of seventy 
or eighty persons, some of them at least men of in- 
telligence, there are very probably members who 
- differ in religious sentiment from the Record, which I 
suppose comes to the same thing. But I never heard 
of anybody amongst them to whom that title was 
applied. If, however, they are ' notorious,' you must 
know them. 

" For the rest, it was set on foot by John Sterling 
eleven years ago. The purpose was to have a monthly 
rendezvous, at very small expense, of persons likely to 
make a pleasant Mess, chiefly of literary character, or 
of a tendency that way. I was elected without my 
knowledge eight years ago, and have dined there once 
or twice a year ever since and hope to continue to do 
so. I should not think the Society is likely to take its 
instructions from the Record, whom it shall admit or 
exclude, or by what name it shall be called." 

The name was changed after this hubbub to the 
" Tuesday "or " Dinner " Club. One of the minutes 
during its " Sterling "^period shows rather humorously 
the apparent simplicity of its aims and customs : — 'a 

90 — {3318) 



3o6 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

** The Sterling Club. 

" Mr. Green's fresh paint makes him unapproach- 
able, whereby all the statutes ^ are nullified. The 
Secretary is gone over to Rome (though only for the 
winter) and the Club is thus left without Law or 
Government, under these circumstances a Rumpsteak 
Committee has been appointed to look to the Repub- 
lick; it consists of all who choose to dine at Mr. Green's, 
Covent Garden, at 7 o'clock next Tuesday. Steaks, 
stout and ale ad lib. for 5s. 6d. a head ; those who 
drink wine do so on their own responsibility. 

Some of Sterling's " Crystals " are sound enough in 
spirit, such as : " We perpetually fancy ourselves in- 
tellectually transparent when we are opaque, and morally 
opaque when we are transparent." " There is no lie 
that many men will not believe ; there is no man who 
does not believe many lies ; and there is no man who 
believes only lies." " One dupe is as impossible as one 
twin." 

It was supposed that the more Sterling got under 
the influence of Carlyle the more he cut himself from 
his friends ; yet, he was able to look at the philosopher 
from a distance and say, "Carlyle preaches 'silence' 
through a trumpet, and proclaims ' good will to men ' 
by mouth of cannon." While Carlyle said of Ster- 
ling's mind, that it " went like a Kangaroo." These 
two great personalities could tilt against each other 
without great ill effects on either side. Carlyle wrote 

^ The Club shall dine at Mr. Green's 
On giving Mr. Green notice, 



JOHN STERLING 307 

his splendid life of Sterling with generous magnanimity, 
ignoring the article his friend had hurled at him, and 
which Sterling himself called " unfortunately harsh and 
exaggerated" ; and when Sterling's end was near, he 
informed some one with joy, " There was a note from 
Carlyle not long since, I think the noblest and ten- 
derest thing that ever came from human pen." 

It is the fashion now to call John Sterling mediocre; 
but as he impressed the people of his time with his 
brilliant profundity, we may leave it that he was as 
Carlyle, who knew and admired him, says : — 

" True, above all, one may call him ; a man of per- 
fect veracity in thought, word and deed. Integrity 
towards all men — nay, integrity had ripened with him 
into chivalrous generosity : there was no guile or 
baseness anywhere found in him. Transparent as 
crystal, he could not hide anything sinister, if such 
there had been to hide. A more perfectly transparent 
soul I have never known. It was beautiful to read all 
those interior movements : the little shades of affec- 
tations, ostentations ; transient spurts of anger, which 
never grew to the length of settled spleen : all so 
naive, so childlike, the very faults grew beautiful to 
you." 



CHAPTER XIV ; 

ALFRED TENNYSON 

The Poet in a golden hour was born, 

With golden stars above ; 
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn. 
The love of love. 

(Alfred Tennyson.) 
I would be 
A poet, were't but for this linked delight. 
This consciousness of noble brotherhood. 
Whose joy no heaps of earth can bury up, 
No worldly venture minish or destroy. 
For it is higher, than to be personal ! 

(Arthur Hallam.) 
A noble friend, a rare one, 
A noble being full of clearest insight. 

{Ibid.) 

It is difficult to define with precision what constitutes 
a Great Man. Most people, if asked, would take refuge 
in illustration and reply, ** So-and-so is a great man." 
The likeliest name to occur as an apt and complete 
example, carrying conviction in its very sound would 
be Alfred Tennyson, whose greatness as a man was 
quite independent of his genius as a poet. He would 
have been a great man though he had never written a 
verse. He had the nobility, the strength, the indi- 
viduality and the complacency of greatness. There 

908 




Alfred Tennyson 

From the portrait hy Savmel Laurence 



ALFRED TENNYSON 309 

was nothing small about him — not even diffidence as 
to abilities, qualms as to results nor deference to popu- 
lar opinion. He had also the presence of a great man; 
he was strikingly handsome, as all the world knows, 
splendid of face and strong of limb. Carlyle describes 
him as " One of the finest-looking men in the world " ; 
and again in a dourer mood, as " A life-guardsman 
spoilt by making poetry," while to all he seemed to 
realize the poetic ideal in appearance. 

He went to Cambridge in the October term of 1827, 
at the same time as those two other remarkable men, 
Monckton Milnes and James Spedding. All three 
soon took their places, as by right, in the splendid 
intellectual set already there prepared to welcome 
them — who numbered amongst them such gifted 
youths as Kemble, Blakesley, BuUer, Sterling and 
Trench. And in the following spring these were joined 
by another genius, destined in his short life to exert 
an ennobling influence and to make an indelible im- 
pression upon all their characters ; who, with his 
polished manners, courtly ways and warm sympathy, 
had the power of fostering friendship all round him. 
It was Arthur Hallam who contrived, by his gentle 
domination, to unite that wonderful band of men — 
all poets by temperament, all full of brilliant promise, 
but all of various humours and dispositions — by bonds 
of youthful friendship, stronger far than any time- 
worn family ties. The activity of these earnest young 
minds, their independence and eagerness to make their 
way in the world had a stimulating effect upon Tenny- 



310 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

son's mind, at that time inclined to be lethargic. 
They gave him a sense of responsibility ; for the first 
time in his life he began under these influences to 
think for himself, and to decide what his future career 
should be ; and, impelled by their cordial enthusiasm 
for his poetic genius, to commence to tesselate the 
path along which he was to wind his way to fame. 

Tennyson was undoubtedly born under a '' golden" 
star. He was especially fortunate in his friends — not 
merely because they were brilliant and remarkable 
men, but because his own innate greatness of soul 
drew forth from them an unswerving devotion and 
loyal support. A man of moods, as a poet is prone 
to be, he had around him this circle of cheerful 
friends, always eager to drive away the shadows from 
his soul, and flood his mind with gladness. Not that 
their warm love for him blinded them to his personal 
eccentricities, which seem, indeed, to have jarred 
considerably upon some of the more precise of his 
intimates. Their remonstrances, however, on the rare 
occasions that they ventured upon them, were of no 
avail with their somewhat spoilt favourite. When, 
for instance, Douglas Heath mustered courage enough 
to suggest to him that a clean shirt might be an 
advantage, the reply he received from the poet — 
determined to defend himself on one side if not on 
another — was ** H'm, yours would not be as clean as 
mine if you had worn it a fortnight." 

Mrs. Ritchie says : " Whewell used to pass over in 
Alfred Tennyson certain informalities and forgetful- 



ALFRED TENNYSON 311 

ness of combinations as to gowns and places and times 
which in another he would never have overlooked." 
The use of tobacco was not yet fashionable in those 
days ; it was even considered " ungentlemanly." 
Tennyson was a slave to the " weed " to the despair 
of his friends, many of whom, however, became them- 
selves, a few years later, confirmed smokers. His friend 
Blakesley once wrote : " Alfred Tennyson has been 
with us for the last week. He is looking well and in 
good spirits, but complains of nervousness. How 
should it be otherwise seeing that he smokes the 
strongest and most stinking tobacco out of a small 
.blackened old pipe on an average nine hours every 
day." In after life Tennyson retaliated and said that 
Cambridge men were all "smoke-sotted"; but the 
Cambridge men had had the first word and even Lush- 
ington said that '' Alfred wasted himself in cigars." 

But his young friends' sensitiveness to these trifling 
solecisms of the poet, never affected their devotion 
to the man, and for this he was ever grateful. For no 
man ever lived to whom affection was such a necessity. 
Tennyson, great in everything, was greatest in friend- 
ship. Sometimes he nursed in silent happiness his 
fondness for his especial intimates ; sometimes his 
love burst from him in beautiful eulogy or lament, 
like the song of the nightingale. And, although his 
Lyrics and Idylls command our admiration, it is his 
Sonnets and Elegies which win our love. Our hearts 
must needs go forth to the author of such tributes of 
affection as the lines to " J.M.K." (the vigorous John 



312 THE CAMBRIDGE '"APOSTLES'* 

Mitchell Kemble), to "J.S." (James Spedding, hardest- 
headed and softest-hearted of all the " Apostles/' the 
death of whose beloved brother drew from Tennyson 
his first memorial poem), and, in later days, his lines 
to Maurice and Brookfield. The stones the poet has 
raised to others form the finest cairn to his memory. 

One of the favourite relaxations of " the set " seem 
to have been the hearing, the reading, the copying out 
of " Alfred's " verse. The days on which he produced 
something fresh — not necessarily a complete perfected 
poem, the germ of one was enough for them — were 
red-letter days with these enthusiasts ; and those who 
could not assemble to hear the latest effort had por- 
tions sent to them, with a bidding to come on the 
first opportunity " to talk it over." Copies and copies 
of his poems were always to be found going about 
Cambridge. It was like the old monastic work — a 
labour of love — and they each of them made and 
distributed more than one copy. 

Although they aU wrote poems — some of conspicuous 
merit — there was but one opinion as to the standing 
of the giant in their midst. Brookfield, who came 
" up " in 1829, came with his portfolio full of credit- 
able verse, which he promptly hid for ever ; but if he 
suppressed his own endeavours, he coaxed and en- 
treated and obtained poetic expression both from 
Tennyson and from Hallam. " Won't you write me a 
sonnet, Alfred ? Hallam has just written me one." 
Both admitted that they owed much to his lively 
stimulus. He would sit while Alfred toyed with his 



ALFRED TENNYSON 313 

favourite pet — a tame snake — and fan the embers of 
the poet's imagination into flame ; or he would pace 
up and down the avenue of Hmes behind Trinity with 
Arthur and Hft his fancy into flight ; and twenty 
years later — and more — Brookfield could still recall, 
word for word, many of these precious talks with his 
two cherished friends. On the celebrated occasion 
when Cambridge magnanimously took pity on Oxford 
and sent forth a deputation to draw her attention to 
the beauties of other poets than Byron, Brookfield, 
although not a chosen representative, assisted them in 
preparing for their mission. He selected quotations 
from Shelley's " Adonais," as well as from Byron's 
" Cain," and slipped in amongst them aptly chosen 
passages, full of new music and fresh beauty, from 
the unknown works of his friend Alfred Tennyson. 
For as Milnes was the enthusiastic quoter and eulogist 
of Brookfield and all his jests, so was Brookfield the 
rapturous reporter and panegyrist of Tennyson and all 
his works. That little Cambridge set would see merit 
only within their own magic circle. It was at a meeting 
which they held to discuss a line of Alfred's — " Draw- 
ing all things towards its brightness as flame draws 
air " — that one of them remarked, " We really ought 
not to be so fastidious in men." Their enthusiasm 
spread beyond the gates of Trinity, for we find at the 
Cambridge Union the question was discussed : 
" Tennyson or Milton — which is the greater poet ? " 
Arthur Hallam being naturally the eloquent advocate 
of his friend. Milton appears to have been the only 



314 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

poet of sufficient magnitude to bear comparison in 
the eyes of these zealous young disciples with the poet 
in their midst. Milnes says of Tennyson's Timhuctoo, 
that it " has made a sensation, it is certainly equal 
to most parts of Milton." 

When Alfred became an ** Apostle " Kemble said 
' The Society has received a great addition in Hallam 
and in Alfred Tennyson, the author of the last prize 
poem, * Timbuctoo/ truly one of the mighty of the 
earth. You will be delighted with him when you see 
him." In the '' Society " he was more fond of listening 
than of talking. He had the sensitiveness of the artis- 
tic temperament and a certain aloofness, which was 
not shyness ; but when he was aroused from reverie 
to speech, it was the joy of the set to listen to him or 
to Hallam as either lolled upon the hearthrug and 
held forth. His one essay, which he never got through, 
was always rallyingly held up against him. His son 
says he was too shy |to deliver this effort, but it is 
possible that in the writing of it he never got beyond 
the Prologue — a fine vigorous piece of prose. 

To Donne, who had already gone " down," Tennant, 
at the time of the publication of the Poems by Two 
Brothers, wrote : — 

*' If I delay any longer to answer your kind letter, 
having already delayed an age, the probability is that 
you will wait till latter Lammas or the Greek Kalends. 
I wish, however, solely to impress upon you a ' deep 
sense of the awful responsibility which lies upon you ' 
of instructing me in the right way by Apostolical 



ALFRED TENNYSON 315 

epistles, and also of having an unwavering faith (for 
he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with 
the wind and tossed) (N.B. — our translators were 
punsters) in my having actually and indeed answered 
each and every letter as soon as it comes to hand ; 
and if you have such faith, so it will be, though I may 
perhaps never put pen to paper — ' for all things are 
as they seem to all,' according to the Flowing Philoso- 
phers. I think your judgment of Charles Tennyson's 
sonnets exceedingly judicious and wise, and to hold 
such an opinion argues a mind above the common 
run ; I hold the same opinion myself. What astonishes 
me is that they should ever have been written by 
Charles Tennyson : he is not the light-haired one 
whom you were introduced to so many times, but a 
younger one, very dark-haired and more of a humorist 
than a poet, although this volume is a sufficient proof 
of the very high character of his poetic powers. Next 
to his brother Alfred (the Timbuctoo poet) I think he 
is by far the greatest poet that I have yet found in 
our generation. Hallam appears to me, notwith- 
standing very many passages of great beauty in his 
meditative pieces, to have a mind rather philosophical 
than poetical. I believe you will receive from him a 
volume of poems which he intended to publish but 
changed his mind after they were printed. Read 
particularly the Meditative Fragments, the Sonnets, 
and the lines about A Child upon a Highland Moor, which 
last I think are especially beautiful. 

" My letter was to have gone with Hallam's book, 
Hallam's book, has waited for Bridge's parcel, and 
Bridge's parcel delayed itsT going; argal my letter 
also hath delayed its going ; and the whole case is 
very similar to the pig driver and his pig — * pig get 
over the style.' I used to think it very singular that 



3i6 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

you had not read Christabel, and very glad now to 
hear you swear yourself horribly in love with her ; in 
my opinion it is a fragment of more touching beauty 
and a more true and living creation than any poem 
since the great days of old. I except the Ancient 
Mariner which I consider equal to it in a very different 
world of poetry, and when I read them and compare 
them together I am amazed at their being the produc- 
tions of the same man. These two force me to place 
Coleridge at the head of all modern poets, although I 
am not quite sure that Keats had not in him the seeds 
of even a higher excellence. I judge chiefly from his 
St. Agnes' Eve, Isabella and miscellaneous poems. 
Shelley also was an incomplete character ; his own 
fiery passions prevented him from creating; he was 
forced back into himself, to think of his own wants 
and his own sufferings. I used to say that he would 
have been a great poet if he had been a good man ; but 
a better acquaintance with his writing has taught me 
to apply more accurately to his character what a 
better acquaintance with men has taught me to judge 
respecting facts. 

" You must by this time be tolerably tired of all this 
critical stuff, and as by a singular coincidence I also 
happen to be tired, I will leave off." 

The whole set were fond of using expressions which 

were purely the poet's own. In a note to " Olpeovres," 

one of his earliest poems, Tennyson said : " Argal— 

This very opinion is only true relatively to the flowing 

philosophers." It was from the last verse of this that 

Tennant quoted : — 

There is no rest, no calm, no pause, 
Nor good nor ill, nor light nor shade, 
Nor essence nor eternal laws : 
For nothing is but all is made. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 317 

But if I dream that all these are, 
They are to me for that I dream. 
For all things are as they seem to all, 
And all things flow like a stream. 

The close friend as well as the ardent admirer of 
Tennyson, it was naturally upon Arthur Hallam that 
the honour devolved of being the munificent godparent 
to the poet's early literary offspring. He took the 
keenest interest in launching the works he appreciated 
so highly and wrote with enthusiasm about them and 
their author. " He is a true and thorough poet, if 
ever there was one ; though I fear his book is far too 
good to be popular, yet I have full faith that he has 
thrown out sparks that will kindle somewhere and will 
vivify young generous hearts in the days that are 
coming to a clearer perception of what is beautiful and 
good." While negotiating with Moxon over the pub- 
lication of Alfred's next poems, Hallam writes to his 
friend : — 

" I have been expecting for some days an answer to 
my letter about Moxon ; but I shall not delay any longer 
my reply to your last, and before this is sent off yours 
may come. I, whose imagination is to yours as Pisgah 
to Canaan, the point of distant prospect to the place of 
actual possession, am not without some knowledge 
and experience of your passion for the past. To this 
community of feeling between us, I probably owe your 
inestimable friendship, and those blessed hopes which 
you have been the indirect occasion of awakening. 
But what with you is universal and all-powerful, ab- 
sorbing your whole existence, communicating to you 
that energy which is so glorious, in me is checked and 



3i8 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

counteracted by many other impulses, already less 
vivacious by nature. . . . You say pathetically, 
' Alas for me ! I have more of the Beautiful than the 
Good ! ' Remember to your comfort that God has 
given you to see the difference. Many a poet has gone 
on blindly in his artist pride." 

It was Arthur Hallam's delight to take Tennyson 
with him on various travels and rambles abroad. At 
the time of the Spanish business, they joined in the 
conspiracy to the extent of carrying money and 
messages to Sefior Ojeda and a group of revolution- 
aries whose headquarters were in the Pyrenees. 
Seilor Ojeda seems to have looked somewhat askance 
at the poet, who was obviously not enthusiastic in 
the cause. However, if he did not enter into the plot 
with full heart, he held his peace concerning it. 

The night Tennyson left Cambridge there was a 
supper in his rooms, after which he and his friends all 
danced quadrilles. In a letter from Brookfield to 
Hallam, earlier in this book, is an account of a dance 
in which the whole set heartily joined, for dances 
after supper often occurred. Tennyson danced with 
zest then, and to the end of his life he indulged at 
intervals in that recreation. A year or so before he died 
Mrs. Brookfield was visiting him at Freshwater, when 
he suddenly said to her, ' * J ane, let us dance . ' ' Although 
she suggested that they were no longer young enough 
for such a pastime, Lord Tennyson pooh-poohed the 
idea and assured her it was his favourite form of 
exercise. He then proceeded with deliberation and 
stateliness, to pirouette by himself all down the room. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 319 

When he went " down " earHer than usual, because 
of his father's health, he was not forgotten at Cam- 
bridge. He was ever to the fore in the minds of his 
faithful friends : they wrote to him constantly, and 
at their banquets they never omitted to toast him. 
Kemble, writing to Milnes, also " down," says, ** If 
you had heard the cheer that followed the health 
of Alfred Tennyson, the poet of the ' Apostles,' at 
our dinner ... if you had ! " While a " Daily 
Divan " used to sit throughout the term for the 
special practice of the Tennyson culte. " The Palace 
of Art " was read to every fresh comrade. " The 
Locus-eaters " was discussed with all the earnest- 
ness of a new religion. And one or other of the 
faithful band of old friends (generally Brookfield) 
would write flattering accounts to the poet of the way 
in which his works were appreciated. But Tennyson, 
though a splendid letter writer, was an indifferent 
correspondent. Speaking of an " Apostolic " banquet 
about to take place " amongst Mankind," Stephen 
Springrice reprimands him thus : "If your health is 
proposed, I shall oppose it on the ground of your 
being an unworthy member of the Society," and this 
because Tennyson was not writing frequently enough to 
please them. Although somewhat spoilt at Cambridge, 
Tennyson somehow got it into his head that he had not 
liked the place, and he expressed his sentiments in a 
sonnet. Venables, who in after life urged him to take 
up his residence in that University city, found, to his 
surprise, that he still nursed some grudge against it. 



320 THE CAMBRIDGE " APOSTLES " 

The death of Hallam was a terrible blow to the poet, 
whose spirit was quite broken by the tragic event. 
His friends feared to tell him of the catastrophe. The 
duty devolved — luckily, one may say — upon Henry 
Elton, uncle to the deceased and a stranger to Tenny- 
son. Garden told Trench, " When in London I saw a 
letter from poor Alfred Tennyson. Both himself and 
his family seem plunged in the deepest affliction, which 
I trust is to end in their discovering what true joy is, 
and where it is to be found." While Monteith said to 
Tennyson, " One feeling that remains with me is a 
longing to preserve all those friends whom I know 
Hallam loved and whom I learnt to love through him. 
He was so much a centre round which we moved that 
now there seems a possibility of many connexions 
being all but dissolved. Since Hallam's death I 
almost feel like an old man looking back on many 
friendships as something bygone." 

It was the Cambridge group of men who urged 
Tennyson to persuade Mr. Hallam to publish Arthur's 
Remains, and Trench a month or two later wrote, 
" Tennyson has, I hear, so far recovered from the 
catastrophe in which his sister was involved, as to have 
written some poems, they say fine ones." 

It is interesting to watch the growth of Tennyson's 
magnificent and immortal monument to Arthur 
Hallam's memory ; how, as in turn each phase of 
sorrow at his friend's loss overwhelmed the poet, he 
found relief in weaving its expression into noble verse. 
Some stanzas he would carry about him and show to 



ALFRED TENNYSON 321 

no one, others he would send to one or other of the 
" wise and good " — generally to Spedding, his favourite 
adviser, seeking for help or encouragement — and so 
year by year the poem advanced. One day in the 
National Gallery he produced several pages of it and 
read them to Brookfield, whom he had met in the 
street, and with whom, sure of a sympathetic " critic," 
he had entered the building. Not only is the splendid 
Elegiac a thing of everlasting beauty, but it was con- 
ceived and produced in an atmosphere all-beautiful. 
The incentive of it was beautiful, the mournful per- 
severance of its making was beautiful, and the beauty 
of its achievement gives us an extra glow of pride in 
the English language. 

When Milnes, in company with Lord Northampton, 
got up the " Tribute " in 1836, a year which found 
Alfred again in sombre mood, thinking but not writing 
— and therefore not publishing — he, as the cause was 
a charity to which most of his friends had decided to 
contribute, asked the poet also to help. To this in- 
vitation Tennyson repHed, " That you had promised 
the Marquis I would write for him something exceed- 
ing the average length of annual compositions — that 
you promised him I would write at all — I took this for 
one of those elegant fictions with which you amuse 
your aunts of evenings, before you get into the small 
hours when dreams are true;" then he goes on to tell 
him that three years before he had been brought to 
swear " through the incivility of editors " never again 

to have anything to do with their " vapid books," " I 

21— (2318) 



322 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

broke it in the sweet face of Heaven when I wrote for 
Lady Whats-her-name Wortley. But then her sister 
wrote to Brookfield, who said she was beautiful, so I 
could not help it. But whether the Marquis be beauti- 
ful or not, I don't mind ; if he be, let him give God 
thanks and make no boast." And he said furthermore, 
" How shall such a modest man as I see my small 
name in collation with the great ones of Southey, 
Wordsworth, Richard Monckton Milnes, etc., and not 
feel myself a barn-door fowl among peacocks." 

Milnes, strange to say, was angered by this refusal, 
and wrote somewhat violently to Tennyson, who, after 
some bombast at the beginning of a letter, said : 
' Had I been writing to a nervous, morbidly irritable 
man, down in the world, stark spoiled with the staggers 
of a mismanaged imagination, and quite opprest by 
fortune and by the reviews, it is possible I might have 
halted to find expressions more suitable to his case ; 
but that you, who seem at least to take the world as 
it comes, to doff it and let it pass, that you, a man 
every way prosperous and talented, should have taken 
pet at my unhappy badinage, made me — lay down my 
pipe and stare at the fire for ten minutes." And he goes 
on to add some admirable words which formulate what 
many have wished to say when the spirit of their letters 
has been misunderstood : " . . . Had I spoken the 
same words laughing to you in my chair, and with my 
own emphasis, you would have seen what they really 
meant, but coming to read them peradventure in a fit 
of indigestion, or with a slight matutinal headache 



ALFRED TENNYSON 323 

after your " Apostolic " symposium, you subject them 
to such misinterpretation as, if I had not sworn to be 
a true friend to you till my latest death rackle, would 
have gone far to make me indignant ! " 

However, this breeze ended by Tennyson generously 
contributing a poem, his brothers also both sending 
sonnets. 

Although Tennyson never felt the pinch of poverty 
he was not in early days an especial favourite of 
fortune ; but he was rich in his friendships ; there was 
the faithful Cambridge band ever ready to brighten 
his outlook if things looked dark. To whichever of his 
intimates he chose to turn, he was sure of a hon accueil ; 
and whenever he passed through London, his old 
cronies — Lushington, Spedding, Venables and the 
rest — fought as to which should entertain him, though 
Milnes observed, *' I do not give him a bed, he can get 
a better one at Spedding's." A relationship was 
always kept up with the Hallams, and it was the his- 
torian who got for him the Civil Pension of £200 a year. 
It was Milnes who, with others, worked the Laureate- 
ship for him. When that compliment was offered him, 
he took a day to consider it and did not make up his 
mind till he had consulted his friends. '' In the end," 
he says, " I accepted the honour because during dinner 
Venables told me that if I became Poet Laureate I should 
always, when I dined out, be offered the liver wing 
of the chicken." 

Perhaps no one was so thoroughly elated at the 
crowning of the poet as his devoted mother. She was 



324 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

quite beside herself with pride in her son, and dehght 
at the Royal recognition of his genius. Occasionally, 
when travelling by omnibus, she would turn to her 
fellow -passengers (who would listen with various 
emotions of sympathy, surprise or apathy) and 
smilingly remark, " It may interest you to know that 
I am the mother of the Poet Laureate," 

The practical side of Tennyson's nature is an object 
lesson to those young poetasters who cultivate a con- 
tempt for worldly wisdom as part of a poet's equip- 
ment. Tennyson had an extraordinarily well-balanced 
mind, and his great genius had two valuable allies in 
his business acumen and in the conspicuous peaceful- 
ness and conventionality of his family life ; it was 
upon these latter that the late Queen Victoria, level- 
headed and clear-minded herself, especially congra- 
tulated him. He was personally an ideal Poet 
Laureate from the point of view of the British public, 
for he was unconventional in small things which pleased 
their sense of fitness, without being unconventional in 
great, which would have shocked their sense of decorum. 
What he liked best, in his innermost heart, was to be 
unconventional in well-ordered conventional surround- 
ings ; and this was probably no pose but what his 
nature demanded. Occasionally some bold spirit 
would reprimand him. On one occasion, when he was 
on a visit in Ireland, with Aubrey de Vere, a sullen 
mood overtook him, and he sought out his hostess and 
began to inveigh against the inanity of dancing ; but 
the lady cut him short, saying, " How would the world 



ALFRED TENNYSON 325 

get on if others went about growling at its amusements 
in a voice as deep as a lion's ? I request that you will 
go upstairs, put on an evening coat, and ask my 
daughter Sophia to dance." 

His sudden attacks of ill-humour seem to have been 
quite independent of his control, they would come 
over him as abruptly and unaccountably as a summer 
storm. Once at a Court Ball, when the poet in a fit 
of absentmindedness, was wandering into the Royal 
circle, and Lord Breadalbane motioned him back, he 
exclaimed loud enough to be heard: "Surely Her 
Majesty might keep her flunkeys in better order." 

Sunderland, who went the mission to Oxford with 
Milnes and Hallam, and who was intellectually the 
greatest of them all — indeed he was perhaps the greatest 
scholar Cambridge has ever seen — was in early days 
handled with some roughness by Tennyson in a poem 
called "A Character." When told that he was the 
person intended, he said, " Oh really, and which 
Tennyson did you say wrote it ? The slovenly one ? " 
Poor Sunderland unfortunately never fulfilled the 
promise he showed. His brilliant mind failed him 
soon after he left Cambridge and he died young. 

In Brookfield's manuscript " Omniana," under the 
heading : " Cooked up by Alfred Tennyson, Peel and 
Whyte, at Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, 1846 (almost all 
Tennyson)," we find piously treasured the following 
lines : — 

Two poets and a mighty dramatist 
Threaded the Needles on a day in June ; 



326 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

Upon the ocean lay a lucid mist, 
And round the clife the sea-bird's plaintive tune 
Resounded, as they row'd beneath the sun. 
For Nature is a wondrous harmonist : 
And as the boat the gentle waters kiss't 
The long wake sparkled in the sleepy noon. 
Bright was the glare on that o'erarching chalk ; 
And soft the washing of the summer seas ; 
And deep and thoughtful was the poet's talk — 
The mighty dramatist — lounging at ease 
And all those three great spirits not to balk, 
Their aspirations clamoured " bread and cheese." 

And against the third hne from the end : " The 
mighty dramatist — lounging at ease," a marginal note, 
" A.T.'s favourite line.'" 

The Mr. Whyte who had the honour — with Peel — 
of assisting the poet to make the above impromptu, 
in writing to Brookfield, invited him to pay him a 
visit, saying, " I am amazingly glad to get away from 
France, and I look back with pride to the fact that I 
speak French with as hideous an accent as ever ! 
To-day I expect Alfred Tennyson, or rather (as he has 
written to announce his arrival) I suspect he won't 
come." 

Side by side, in the " Omniana " book, with the 
above quaint composition is the following in Brook- 
field's writing : " By Alfred Tennyson, I should think 
thirty years ago. (I write this at Somerby, Grantham, 
Thursday, October 15, 1868, from memory) : — 

O'er the dark world flies the wind 

And clatters in the sapless trees, 
From cloud to cloud in darkness bhnd 

Swift stars scud over sounding seas. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 327 

I look ;Tthe showery skirts unbind : 

Mars by the lonely Pleiades 
Burns overhead. With brows declined 

I muse — I wander from my peace, 
Dividing still the rapid mind 

This way and that in search of ease. 

Brookfield comments upon this, *' ' Bleak ' in the first 
Hne seems to me to be better, as ' darkness ' comes in 
third Hne." This instance of a friend of Tennyson's 
throwing his mind back over a lapse of years and jot- 
ting down from memory a treasured fragment of his 
poetry is not put forward as an extraordinary feat ; 
it is only typical of the devotion which the whole set 
paid to their idol. 

It is interesting to get glimpses of the workings 
of the poet's mind ; to see how on reflection he 
would sometimes be at pains to make at the last 
moment some apparently trifling alteration in his lines. 
Thus, in his sonnet to William George Ward, Tennyson, 
in the first copy sent to that gentleman's relations, 
wrote, " Most liberal of all Ultramontanes," which 
he elected, in the published version, to alter to " Most 
generous." It is questionable whether the poet's 
second thought was in this case the happier. 

Similarly, in the sonnet to Brookfield, he wrote, in 
the original MS. : — 

Brooks, for they call'd you so that loved you best, 
Old Brooks, who knew so well to mouth my rhymes; 

and in the published version he transposed the words 
" loved " and " knew." When he had completed that 



328 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

beautiful tribute to his old comrade, he wrote to Mrs. 
Brookfield and her son Charles to make an appoint- 
ment for them to hear it. He arrived, in his long round 
cloak, his scroll of poetry in his hand, accompanied by 
a massive elderly lady — not unknown on the plat- 
form nor on the back-drawing-room stage — capari- 
soned in a tight-fitting violet velvet dress with a long 
train. He had not met the widow of his old friend 
since her husband's death, and both he and she felt 
somewhat constrained ; so after a conventional greet- 
ing, he handed the script to his stately companion, 
saying, " Here, 3/ou'd better read this." The lady in 
the violet velvet train took the scroll in both hands, 
partially unrolled it, advanced to the centre of the 
room, read a few lines to herself in a stage whisper, 
with much facial expression, as though she had never 
seen the script before, then, suddenly falling upon both 
knees, exclaimed in tragedy tones, '' Oh ! this is too 
divine to be read in any other attitude ! " and forth- 
with proceeded to declaim it by heart. 

Another note from Brookfield's " Omniana " records 
that when a letter arrived from anybody of importance, 
his children would ask him, " Papa, is this an auto- 
graph ? " meaning does it deserve keeping as such ? 
One day, July 10, 1866, he writes, " Alfred Tennyson 
went into Charley's nursery last night and kissed him 
as he lay asleep. Being told of this this morning, the 
child exclaimed, " Oh, then, now Fm an autograph ! " 

Tennyson did not look upon himself as a religious 
man ; he said people would not understand his reli- 



ALFRED TENNYSON 329 

gion if he told them what it was. His son says, " He 
held the doctrine of a personal immortality and was 
by no means content to accept our present existence 
as a mere preparation for the life of more perfect 
beings." He once asked John Sterling whether he 
would be content with such an arrangement, and 
Sterling had replied that he would. " I would not," 
added Tennyson, emphatically; "I should consider 
that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made 
simply a means of ushering in something higher than 
myself." 

His Confessions of a Sensitive Mind or Supposed Confes- 
sions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with 
Itself, to give it its full original title, are obviously 
reflections of the nightmare of rebellious doubt through 
which he and all the other over-eager souls of his time 
had to struggle in their early Cambridge days. 

" Yet," said I, in my morn of youth, 
The unsunned freshness of my strength, 
When I went forth in quest of truth, 

" It is a man's privilege to doubt." 

* * * 

Shall a man live thus, in joy and hope 

As a young lamb, who cannot dream. 

Living, but that he shall live on ? 

Shall we not look into the laws 

Of life and death ? and things that seem. 

And things that be, and analyse 

Our double nature, and compare 

All creeds till we have found the one, 

If one there be ? 

* ♦ * 

O weary life ! O weary death ! 
O spirit and heart made desolate ! 
O damned vacillating state ! 



330 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Later in the poet's work there are happily many 
evidences of peace attained at last. And in a letter 
written in 1874, he says^ *' For I believe that the dead 
live, whatever pseudo-savants may say." 

It is a warm and glowing picture, the end of Tenny- 
son's life. The splendid old bard, his Bible at his 
side, with his beautiful surroundings, fading into the 
sunset ; his great achievements like banners around a 
cathedral, his noble poetry resounding his own Re- 
quiem. Did he not sing, when his first child died : — 

Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 

Infinite Ideality ! 

Immeasurable Reality ! 

Infinite Personality ! 

Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 



CHAPTER XV 

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 

We meet not now, as once, day after day, 

In pleasant intercourse to change our thoughts : 

But I can well remember all that time. 

And all the thoughts that filled it — for just then 

We were as merchants seeking goodly pearls. 

(Richard C. Trench.) 

I am at rest — my centre I have found 

The circle's edge I had been wandering round. 

{Ibid.) 

From that remarkable group of earnest young scholars, 
impetuous young philosophers, and dreamy young 
poets, Trench stands forth distinguished by the 
maturity of his moral qualities. With as great in- 
tellectual gifts as they, he seems to have had — if one 
may use the expression — a more grown-up soul. To 
all the graceful endowments of oratory, poetry and 
the like, which he shared with his fellows, he possessed 
in addition the gift of sound good sense. 

He passed swiftly and practically unscathed through 
the Inferno of youthful religious doubt, and he was 
accordingly able to give his manly guidance to those 
less fortunate, who were willing to accept it. 



332 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Perhaps the friend who profited most by Trench's 
help was Arthur Hallam ; the two had many a dis- 
cussion, in the course of one of which the younger man 
observed : " Perhaps the usual prejudice against 
prayers for special earthly gifts has gone a great way to 
remove faith out of the Church by destroying the sense 
of nearness and filial relation to God." Sterling and 
Maurice, who were Trench's close companions, occa- 
sionally allowed him to coax them down from the 
Babel heights of " Apostolic " dispute ; but they 
would soon clamber up again to the level of confusion. 
Probably they would both have achieved in their lives 
greater things with fewer throes had they submitted 
to be guided by Trench. Those in Cambridge and 
outside who did not appreciate the " Apostles " and 
who resented their assumption of superiority in under- 
taking to enlighten every one upon things intellectual 
and spiritual, could not see as we can, at this distance 
of time, that the world at large was in a state of moral 
ferment, that every man was either yearning to hear 
or bursting to tell ; that the most enlightened, such 
as our young friends, were eager to do both ; that is 
to say, to acquire quickly — with their facility for 
learning ; and to impart quickly — with their genius for 
declaiming. The difficulty with them was to find the 
precise source from which to draw the prophecies it 
should be their mission to pour forth. Dissatisfied as 
they were, at that period, with their Church, these young 
theorists with their picturesque minds endeavoured to 
blend philosophy and poetry into some kind of a moral 




Richard Chenevix Trench 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 333 

code which should enhghten those in darkness and 
solve the problems of life and death. 

But while his fellow '^ Apostles " carried on their 
studies and discussions and efforts in this golden direc- 
tion, with all the buoyant sanguineness of youth, Trench 
looked on with profound melancholy. With his 
superior wisdom and calmer judgment, he saw the 
futility of his young friends' schemes and realized the 
morbid effect which the investigations upon which 
they had so recklessly embarked might have upon 
their characters. Whenever he was drawn into their 
debates upon philosophical subjects, they plunged 
him still deeper into depression ; indeed that passing 
wave of thought gave him a prejudice against Cam- 
bridge which lasted for many years. He protested 
frankly that he '' disliked the whole band of Platonico- 
Wordsworthian-Coleridgian-anti-Utilitarians," mean- 
ing the whole Apostolic circle while they were under 
the influence of the prevailing atmosphere. Sterling 
found him one day expressing his sentiments of ap- 
prehension in flowing verse, and exclaimed, " You 
would probably have been a poet in any circum- 
stances." 

Trench's first experiment in literature was, curiously 
enough, a tragedy which was meant for the stage. 
It was entitled " Bernardo del Carpio," and was 
esteemed a fine piece of work. It was handed round 
among his Cambridge friends and freely commented 
upon, after the fashion of those men and times ; and 
it was ultimately submitted to Macready, who read 



334 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

it twice (so he says) and invited the dramatic aspirant 
to call upon him, "as I cannot convey to you by letter, 
with any satisfaction or completeness, my opinion with 
regard to the elements necessary to the success of your 
Tragedy." This was the play which Trench destroyed 
when he went to Dublin as Archbishop of that See. 

Sterling wrote to him on the subject of this drama : — 

" Kemble, not long ago, inflicted upon me a morning 
visit of some three hours, in the course of which he 
spoke highly of the talent it shows (the worse symptoms 
I've heard of it as yet), but says it requires alteration 
for the stage. I trust you will let me judge for myself. 
If you do me the favour, I tell you beforehand I shall 
be as candid as Mrs. Candour herself, and tell you all 
the faults I can discover. You remember Roche- 
foucauld says that friendship is shown by telling your 
friend of his errors, not his merits, and for once the 
sour-hearted cynic is right." 

He says furthermore : — 

" I pity the poor old hero, who having been dragged 
from the tomb by your witching, is condemned to lie 
for so many weeks in that limbo of vanity, filled with 
all manner of ghosts and abortions, Kemble's port- 
folio." 

On some other occasion, in asking some favour of 
Trench, he said : "If you will do this, you will place 
yourself in my estimation between Jeremy Bentham 
and Jacob Behmen." 

After taking his degree. Trench travelled on the 
Continent and went to Spain, intending to wander 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 335 

peacefully throughout that romantic country and to 
cultivate the Spanish language^ in the study of which 
he had already made considerable progress under the 
tuition of one of Sterling's political proteges. Here 
he made up his mind to take orders, but determined 
to come back and " give himself a calm studious year " 
before actually entering the Church. 

But in the midst of his holiday, Torrijos, whom he 
had met in London, and liked and sympathized with, 
became freshly compromised (Trench discovered this 
and wrote to Sterling, " Unless he returns armed, he 
had better keep out of the way of the royalists"); 
and Sterling in England was taking up the cudgels on 
behalf of the revolutionaries ; Tennyson, Hallam, 
Kemble, and many others of the " Apostolic " band, 
were also agitating. When he found his friends de- 
voting themselves heart and soul to the cause of liberty 
and actually proposing to follow the call to arms and 
fight in its support. Trench, the least truculent of 
men, with characteristic loyalty, determined to throw 
in his lot with theirs and joined the conspiracy. The 
moral value of an act depends upon its intention. We 
may applaud the spirit of all the young men who took 
part in that struggle for freedom ; we are bound to 
admire the enthusiasm and the self-sacrifice and the 
courage of every one of them. But some had illusions 
to fortify them, others a love for romantic adventure, 
others a combative nature ; Trench had none of these. 
For this enlightened young scholar, with no revolu- 
tionary kink in his brain, with no taste for conflict nor 



336 THE CAMBRIDGE ''APOSTLES" 

for strange experience, to set aside his better judgment 
and sally forth, his life in his hand, through sheer 
staunchness to his friends, was an act of heroism which 
it were hard to match. 

Once pledged to the wild scheme. Trench threw him- 
self into it with the thoroughness and dash of a born 
buccaneer. While he was arranging with Kemble the 
details of their route to Spain, to the spot which was 
to be the point of attack, he wrote to that gentle- 
man : — 

" I cannot rest for hearing the hum of mighty 
workings, and am very anxious if there is any news 
that you should give it to me, and how soon it is 
probable that we shall be wanted. I am in high 
spirits at the prospect of our speedy hanging, as any- 
thing is better than to remain and rot in this country." 

Yet during the long dreary vigil at Gibraltar, he 
wrote a sonnet, England, we love thee better than we 
knew.'' 

Trench, once in Spain, did all the little it was possible 
to do, and keenly alive to Sterling's anxieties on behalf 
of his friends whom he felt were exposed to danger 
mainly at his instigation, wrote to Donne : " Should 
anything disastrous happen — I mean, should we all be 
cut off — for God's sake go to London immediately and 
be with Sterling. I have shuddering apprehensions 
of how he may receive the news. He will accuse him- 
self as the cause of all." Throughout he seems to 
have been full of thought and tender solicitude for 
every one but himself. Sterling wrote, " Trench 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 337 

has shown himself what he always was, one whose 
feelings are pure as crystal and warm as the sun." 
Of his attitude over the affair of the attempted 
raid, Thirlwall said in a letter of introduction to 
Bunsen in Rome, whither Trench a year or so later 
went on account of his health : — 

" In a circle which comprised the strongest minds 
and noblest spirits of our youth (this was the 
' Apostle's ' Society) he was distinguished for his fine 
literary taste, his poetical talent and the generous 
ardour of his character. Soon after leaving the 
University he accompanied the unfortunate Torrijos 
. in his expedition to Spain and stayed with him at 
Gibraltar till every chance of success had vanished. 
His motive for embarking on the adventure was much 
more one of private friendship for Torrijos, than any 
political interest in the cause." 

But the failure of the " cause " was so complete and 
terrible that Trench, like SterHng, could never bear to 
hear it mentioned, and very rarely indeed would he 
himself allude to it. The tragic death of Boyd was as 
shocking to him as to Sterling ; but while it had the 
result of thoroughly recollecting and steadying Trench's 
thoughts, it seems to have had the effect upon Sterling 
of entirely unsettling his mind. When Trench did 
once make allusion to the unfortunate expedition it 
was only to say sadly, " Ah ! the whole business may 
have been misguided and inglorious, but believe me, 
it was not unheroic." 

When he got back to Cambridge in 1831, in order to 

22— (2318) 



338 THE CAMBRIDGE ^^ APOSTLES" 

attend his Divinity Lectures, with a heart settled by 
sorrow and an outlook widened by experience, he had 
evidently become reconciled to his alma mater, for he 
wrote : *' I am far more attached to Cambridge than 
I had thought. There are very few here, if any, whom 
you know — Blakesley and Hallam, both worthy to be 
known, and others who will make it very difficult for 
me to keep my determination of withdrawing myself 
altogether from the small and irritating intellectual 
excitements of the place." 

Tennyson writes in the course of a letter to Brook- 
field about this time the following enthusiastic testi- 
mony of their common friend : — 

"You and Trench, I am told, grew very intimate 
with one another before he left Cambridge ; it is im- 
possible to look upon Trench and not to love him, 
though he be, as Fred says, always strung up to the 
highest pitch, and the earnestness which burns with- 
in him so flashes through all his words and actions 
that when one is not in a mood of sympathetic eleva- 
tion, it is difficult to present a sense of one's own in- 
feriority and lack of all high and holy feeling. Trench 
is a bold and true-hearted Idoloclast, yet have I no 
faith in any one of his opinions. Hallam got a letter 
from Stradbally the other day. T. writes that they 
keep armed watch and ward all night, a state of things 
I should think not very disagreeable to him who would 
have smitten off both ears (whose jest was that ? the 
man who made it deserves to be cultivated)." 

In 1833 Trench was ordained deacon and appointed 
curate to the Reverend J. H. Rose, at Hadleigh. 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 339 

Thither came Newman, Hurrell Froude and Arthur 
Perceval for their " Great Conference " (at which 
Trench had the privilege of assisting), when the im- 
portant question was discussed as to what form the 
Tracts for the Times should take. Trench tells us it 
was Hurrell Froude who made the greatest impression 
upon him on that occasion. 

He still kept in with the '* Apostles." Garden 
writes to Milnes : ** My ten days with Trench were 
precious. He is the best man and the best clergyman 
I ever knew and his preaching superb, yet plain enough 
for his auditors." Trench writes to Donne asking : 
" Do you know aught of private news concerning the 
* Apostles ' of late ? Blakesley has taken orders, 
Spedding has gained some University essays — of Ster- 
ling I heard a week ago." He was in Rome with 
several of the " Society " the winter of 1834-5, when 
there was " quite a Cambridge coterie," as Milnes 
called it. Trench's ingenuousness is charming when 
he tells how he wished to help himself from a sermon 
preached by a Jesuit at the Gesu, " but as I saw 
some English listening too, must do it with moder- 
ation," and this confession indicates that the habit 
of " helping oneself " is not purely of to-day, and, 
as Brookfield shows, it was a method which ran 
through all of them. 

On his return from Italy he began to publish his 
poems. " Justin Martyr " came out in 1835. " Have 
you seen Trench's new volume ? Here we all think 
the clergyman has swallowed up the poet, and also 



340 THE CAMBRIDGE ^^ APOSTLES" 

that it would have been well if the castastrophe had 
taken place before the latter had written his last 
book," said Blakesley to Milnes. Milnes was much 
excited about this work, and especially so because 
" Wiseman reviewed it," while to Milnes Trench said 
deprecatingly about these poems, '' I am afraid it is 
the religious world that have bought them, not the 
poetical." But this was an excess of modesty, for as 
a matter of fact Trench's writing glowed with the 
poetry which filled his soul, and which shone even from 
his countenance. W. H. Donne said he had a print of 
Keats, ** which I love to look on for its beauty and 
fire ; it reminds me of Trench." It was certainly 
the poetic in religion, as in all else, which appealed to 
him most strongly. It is a pity he had not the time 
to devote himself more to the writing of verse ; but 
he was devoted to duty and a hard and conscientious 
worker ; few have left behind them more actual 
evidences than he of deep study and scholarly appli- 
cation. 

When Brookfield took a curacy at Southampton in 
1836, he found himself a close neighbour to Trench at 
Botley Hill. There they revived their college friend- 
ship and a pleasant intimacy ensued, and there Brook- 
field wrote down, day by day as they were composed, 
the poems that his friend gave off. In a little book 
at hand, in the neatest writing, all dated, are all the 
sonnets and couplets and longer pieces which Trench 
wrote between the year 1836 and 1840, which were 
prolific years with him. They used to take each other's 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 341 

services, and ramble and drive together, their con- 
versations being always on poetry or theology. 
Brookfield took him, as he took Tennyson and others 
of them, to the Eltons, when he wrote in Mary Elton's 
album the lovely sonnet which begins :— 

Not thou from us, O Lord, but we 
Withdraw ourselves from Thee. 

" I like Mr. Trench extremely," said that young 
lady, " such an earnest yet such a mild man." 

In 1838 when the " Sterling " was inaugurated, he 
wrote : — 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" I was quite ashamed of the letter with which I 
troubled you from London ; indeed, if it had not 
been for the temptation of a frank I do not think I 
should have written it. As it is, let me offer you my 
best thanks for your zealous kindness in the matter and 
for all the pleasure v/hich four days' freedom obtained 
for me by you brought me. Nothing had been done 
concerning your election to the ' Sterling Club,' but 
the matter was put in train by me, and your balloting 
will come on next time. I am very glad there was no 
further delay, as the numbers are limited to fifty, and 
we are within three or four of that already. We had 
a very pleasant gathering, much in the old Cambridge 
spirit, and all were at ease with one another. I wish 
the mystery had found greater favour in your eyes, 
as one is never willing to believe that one had bestowed 
labour in vain ; however, I dare say your judgment is 
right. 

" Affectionately yours, 

" Richard C. Trench." 



342 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

Brookfield — with his usual critical frankness charac- 
teristic of the set — had given an adverse criticism on 
a new effort of Trench's. He was not elected this time 
to the " Sterling," but presently, as a great surprise 
and pleasure to himself, he found himself a member. 

When Trench's little son was dying, he wrote : — 

" BoTLEY Hill, '' January, 1841. 
" My dear Brookfield, — 

" Thank you for your kind note — it has reached us 
in a time of heavy affliction. Our dear eldest boy is 
about to be taken from us (your little friend Francis) — 
I may say is already taken, and lies almost without 
sense and motion, waiting till his spirit takes flight. 
The sweet child has been thus suddenly brought low 
by inflammation on the brain, issuing in water on the 
head. On Christmas Day we thought him ill, and on 
New Year's Day the conviction was brought home upon 
us that he would die ; and all efforts have proved in- 
effectual to arrest the progress of the disease. 

" Oh, may this affliction, grievous as it now is, bear 
hereafter peaceable fruits of righteousness. I trust it 
will lead us to great searchings of heart, that we may 
see what and in how many ways we have been provoking 
the Lord, till he has arrested us with a sudden hand 
in our course of departure from Him. Mrs. Trench 
has gone wonderfully through scenes of the most 
agonizing description, for you know perhaps the anguish 
which the disorder causes ; but strength has been given 
her equal to the need, and we have to praise for the 
patience and meekness given to the poor sufferer. 

" Adieu, my dear friend. When I am in town I will 
look you out. 

** Yours affectionately, 

" R. C. Trench." 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 343 

To which Brookfield replied : — 

" My dear Trench, — 

" Be sure that I very sincerely share in your grief 
because of that dear boy whom I loved very much. 
The consolations which I might suggest will have 
suggested themselves I am sure already to your heart. 
Still it must be a high exertion of the new and better 
nature for a parent not only to acquiesce in the will of 
God, but to render hearty thanks that it hath pleased 
Him to deUver his child out of the miseries of this 
sinful world. Such an exertion, however, must be 
prayed for and endeavoured. I hope it is not trifling 
with Holy Writ to apply to your departed child a sen- 
tence which was first spoken of two persons with a 
somewhat different meaning of his two brothers. 
* One is this day with our Father and one is not,' and 
so to let the blessedness of the joint clause take away 
the sting of the second. 

" It must be a subject of great thankfulness to you 
that Mrs. Trench has found the efficiency of those funds 
of support and consolation which she had stored up 
for so dark a day as that must be which for the first 
time finds a mother ' weeping for her children.' 

" I heartily pray God to comfort you both abun- 
dantly and to enable you so to sow in tears that you 
may reap in joy. 

" God bless you, my dear Trench, 

** Yours affectionately, 

"W. H. Brookfield." 

In 1^44 Lord Ashburton offered Trench Itchenstoke, 
a living not far from the Grange. Trench used to tell 
quaintly how Lady Ashburton encouraged him to take 
it by saying, " There are no poor to harass one's 



344 THE CAMBRIDGE '^ APOSTLES" 

feelings." While he was there parties from the Grange 
would often come over and burst in upon him. Thac- 
keray once says, " To-day we have had a fine walk — 
to Trench's parsonage, a pretty place three miles off, 
through woods a hundred thousand colours. The 
poet was absent, but his good-natured wife came to see 
us — by us I mean me. Lady Ashburton, and Miss 
Farrer — who walked as aide de camp by my lady's 
pony." 

Trench was himself most interested in the poor, and 
worked so hard in and out of the Irish cabins during 
the famine time, that he was laid up with a fever, con- 
tracted while engaged in relieving the starving. But he 
from this time got a little away from the '' Apostolic " 
centre ; afterwards his society became naturally more 
purely ecclesiastical. He was somewhat swayed by 
his friendship for Wilberforce, who said to him, " My 
dear Trench, if there were only one book left in the 
world — putting aside the Bible — what would you 
choose ? " '' Oh, I have no doubt, of course, I should 
choose St. Augustine." To which Wilberforce re- 
plied, " Ah, I know you think me a terrible Calvinist." 

It was Trench who buried Harriet, Lady Ashburton, 
and he said, referring to all the distinguished 
mourners who attended her funeral, amongst whom 
were a goodly percentage of " Apostles," '' It was 
not so much this woman's sympathy or attraction 
that these men felt as they stood by her grave, but 
the echoes of their own — now passing — brilliancy and 
maturity." 



RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH 345 

And when Thackeray died, he wrote to Brookfield : 
" I understand the funeral of our dear departed friend 
is to be on Tuesday. Can you tell me exactly when 
and where, and whether the presence of those who 
honoured and loved him, though not bound to him b}^ 
ties of blood or of especial intimacy, would be wel- 
come ? In such a case I should like much to attend, 
and would put off my going to Ireland for a day that I 
might so do." 

Richard Chenevix Trench possessed not only the 
thoughts and lyre of a lofty poet, but all the mediaeval 
high qualities of which he loves to sing — loyalty, de- 
votion, rectitude, courage. There was no one in that 
gifted circle of " Apostles " who did not profit — or 
who might not, had he chosen, have profited — from 
intimacy with Trench. The most faithful to his 
friends, the most unswerving from the path of duty, 
and, with Kemble, the most daring when brought face 
to face with danger. He expresses very beautifully 
in one of his sonnets, as one who has felt what he de- 
scribes, the yearning of youth to achieve and the 
patience he should have when opportunity is with- 
held :— 



Why have we yet no great dehverance wrought ? 
Why have we not truth's banner yet unfurled. 
High floating in the face of all the world ? 
Why do we live and yet accomplish naught ? 
These are the stirrings of an unquiet thought. 
What time the years pass from us of our^ youth. 
And we unto the altar of high truth 
As yet no worthy offering have brought. 



346 THE CAMBRIDGE '^APOSTLES" 

Butnow we" bid these restless longings cease': 

If heaven has aught for us to do or say, < 

Our time will come : and we may well hold peace, 

When He, till thrice ten years had passed away. 

In stillness and in quietness up grew. 

Whose word once spoken should make all things new. 



CHAPTER XVI 

GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 

My own friend, my old friend ! 

Time's a soldier bold friend ! 

Of his lofty prowess 

Many a tale is told, friend ! 
* * * * 

But though earthly nature 
Has so frail a mould, friend ! 
What the tyrant cannot do 
Is to make us cold, friend ! 

{Richard Monckton Milnes.) 

The historic encounter between Master Thackeray and 
Master Venables which took place in the Charterhouse 
playground in the year 1824, though it cost the former 
the symmetry of his nose, proved to be the uncon- 
ventional inception of a valuable and life-long intimacy. 
The impetuous young Thackeray was the challenger, 
but it was also he who, after his defeat and on a little 
reflection, prof erred to the victorious Venables the 
friendship which was eagerly accepted and which 
never afterwards wavered for a moment. Venables 
had already another beloved school-friend, the younger 
Lushington, whose companionship Thackeray willingly 
accepted, and the three lads formed a happy and 



348 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

affectionate triumvirate united by similar tastes, and 
a common implacability towards Dr. Russell, a head- 
master of the old unsympathetic-disciplinarian order- 
Venables went up in 1829 to Jesus, but he im- 
mediately associated himself with the Trinity set. 
He competed for the Chancellor's Medal for English 
verse the Timbuctoo year, and won it in 1831 with the 
North-West Passage, a fine piece of work in which he 
says : — 

There is rest 
Dismal and dreary on the silent sea, 
Most dismal quiet : for the viewless might 
Of the keen frost wind crisps the curling waves, 
Binding their motion with a clankless chain 
Along the far horizon. 

He was by all the set considered to be a " great " 
man. He had considerable humour, of a somewhat 
cynical and acidulated kind, not unlike that of his 
friend W. H. Thompson, and his carefully balanced 
epigrams were welcomed and treasured and much 
quoted by his companions. Whewell, whom they 
all respected, came in at one time for a good deal 
of criticism, and Venables' " Whewell's humbug and 
inbecility reciprocally limit each other " was received 
with joy. 

Venables was tall and strong and strikingly hand- 
some, as his picture late in life, painted by John Collier, 
proclaims. He had a slight lisp which lent a distinct 
character to his pungent remarks, while the gravity and 
dignity of his demeanour enhanced the effect of his 




George Stovin Vciiables 

From the paintuig by the Hon. John Collier 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 349 

conversational sallies. It was said of him that " a 
more delightful companion was never known." 

He took his B.A. in 1832, M.A. in 1835, became 
fellow of Jesus and was called to the Bar in 1836. He 
went on the Oxford circuit for a little, but afterwards 
confined himself entirely to Parliamentary practice. 
Recognized as the intellectual equal of the ablest men 
of his time, he chose, in his non-professional hours, 
employment at which little reputation could be made. 
His public work was anonymous journalism. He 
wrote for the Saturday and other reviews, as well as 
for The Times newspaper, of which he usually com- 
piled the annual summary. He was a type of journalist 
less rare eighty years ago than now. A polished 
gentleman in easy circumstances, and of good social 
position, of lofty thought, and high scholarly attain- 
ments, he worked not for profit or reclame, but to raise 
the minds of the multitudes and instil into them the 
spirit of patriotism and loyalty. 

He was much attached to all his old '* Apostle " 
friends. Lushington was, of course, his most intimate 
associate ; their friendship, indeed, rivalled that of 
Tennyson and Hallam. Milnes attracted and fasci- 
nated him, and he had a high esteem and admiration 
for Tennyson, whom he saw constantly and to whom 
he wrote often and critically. He pushed his work with 
all his power, and when the " Princess " was written, 
it was he who suggested and composed the second 
line at the beginning of the fourth book, which 
runs : — 



350 THE CAMBRIDGE '^ APOSTLES" 

There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun, 

// that hypothesis of theirs he sound. 



His affection for the great poet and his family was 
cordially reciprocated, and the bond between them 
was strengthened by the Lushington link which, had 
all things shaped themselves as Venables sometimes 
dreamed, would have been two-fold. 

There is a popular impression that Thackeray 
founded the character of " George Warrington " in 
Pendennis upon George Venables, but it is difficult to 
discover the faintest resemblance between the two. 
It is true that Venables wrote *' in a newspaper now 
and then " and that his style was easily recognizable 
by " the strong thoughts and curt periods, the sense, 
the satire, and the scholarship." But on the other 
hand there was never a journalist less of a '* Bohemian " 
— nor, indeed, more of " Gorgio " — than Venables ; he 
was never a pipe-smoker, nor did any one ever see him, 
after manhood, unshorn. 

His polished manners no less than his polished wit 
made him greatly in demand for social functions, 
especially dinners and house parties. He used to tell 
a story of a certain well known earl whom he met at 
Lansdowne House, of whom he asked whether he ever 
saw Punch ? *' Why, no," replied his lordship, *' to 
say the truth I'm — er — not much of a bookworm ! " 

When asked by Mrs. Sartoris to differentiate be- 
tween two persons who had unaccountably crept into 
Society (which resented their presence) he said, '' One 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 351 

is a snob without being vulgar, and the other is vulgar 
without being a snob." 

When Brookfield was getting up oral reading " by 
persons possessing leisure and a fair amount of the 
personal qualifications requisite for such a function," 
as wholesome and instructive amusement for the poor, 
he asked Venables to give him advice as to what he 
would recommend for such readings, on which Venables 
replied : — 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" I should think it might be said that the first ad- 
vantage of reading out v/hat is good in itself is that it 
multiplies the appreciation of the book almost by the 
number present, just as a small joke or a dog running 
down the course makes thousands of people laugh 
though it would not make a single person smile. This 
is remarkably the case with poetry, read to those who 
care for poetry, and it is much easier to find an audience 
which cares for some kinds of prose. There is an ex- 
citement in any simultaneous thought or feeling which 
cannot be produced in solitude. Then it is only by 
reading out or listening that the attention of most 
people is fixed on the language, the precision, and the 
harmony which with other things constitute style, and 
form the element of art in literature and the condition 
of permanence. Nearly all readers, especially in an 
age of reading, read idly and carelessly for the sake 
of the matter, which can be got at almost in uncon- 
sciousness of the words. This is the way in which 
newspapers are read, forming probably nine-tenths of 
the reading of ninty-nine hundredths of people who 
can read. The same careless way of reading extends 
to books which would deserve more attention. Another 



352 THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

class of readers are careless of style from extreme in- 
terest in the subject. As Germans who are contented 
with a profusion of victuals not cooked at all, that is 
of long involved sentences full of learning, but neither 
balanced nor in tune, and with the verb at the end. 
Consequently hardly any German has ever been able 
to write his own language, and I should think it must 
be impossible to read out any but one or two books 
of German prose. 

" All poetry that is good for anything is good to 
read out to those who care for it, but it is chilling work 
to read it to those who listen to it, as I do to a soprano 
cavatina in E. 

" But all poetry is carefully finished in language, 
and not merely shovelled out like blue book prose. 
It is for this reason chiefly that it does to read out. 
One great advantage of the habit of reading out by a 
judicious reader is that he is almost certain for his 
own sake to select books or passages which have a 
more or less carefully elaborated style. For style is 
neither more nor less than the whole art of litera- 
ture 

" I think you might digress for four and a half 
minutes on style, of which the capability of pleasant 
utterance is one of the most infallible tests. Perfect 
lucidity and due proportion of meaning to sound being 
elements, and the arrangement of thoughts and words 
as far as possible in the natural or logical order. The 
mere reader, if he does not understand the beginning 
of a sentence or paragraph can look at the end. 
Articles in The Times begin with an anecdote or a story 
of generalities which are both really and apparently 
nearly as well adapted to the reformation of adult 
criminals as to Schleswig-Holstein, but the world in 
general can look just as easily at the middle of the 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 353 

article as at the beginning, and therefore it never 
notices the essential error of the composition. 

" A sensitive oral reader instinctively sympathizes 
with the vexation of an audience which is puzzled or 
bored, and he then finds by experience that he is 
safest in reading authors who win readers in their art ; 
this reading tends therefore to improve and elevate 
the taste and generally to make the treatment, the 
language, in short, the art, more prominent than the 
mere gratification of curiosity. In Miss Austen the 
pleasure of the details and the simple, forcible style 
prevail over any tendency to hurry to the end. I 
think you could find in her novels some admirable 
passages of intelligible and pleasant humour and good 
sense — not much pathos. Charles Lamb is admirable 
for reading out — he polished every word as well as 
every sentence and nothing could be changed without 
destroying the whole value. For one thing Sterne's 
language is admirably simple and fine, and notwith- 
standing his indecencies he had an admirable taste in 
creating pure and refined characters with very few 
touches. In the story of Lefevre himself, there is no 
superfluous piling up of miseries, merely a melancholy 
condition which speaks for itself, and the pathetic effect 
is produced mainly by the sympathy of Uncle Toby, 
whose gentleness again gives force to his celebrated 
oath, and I think his character might be illustrated by 
two or three other short quotations, as his reply to 
Mr. Shandy when he had insulted him about his for- 
tification books and his remark on Ernulphus's curse, 
that he could not find it in his head to curse the devil, 
etc. He is cursed and damned already, said Dr. Slop. 
" I am sorry for it," said my Uncle Toby. Even the 
little circumstance of his getting his roquelaure to go 

out in the cold and dark, and Trim's unwillingness to 

23— (2318) 



354 THE^^CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

let him go, are skilfully brought in, and the whole is 
admirably short. 

" I should certainly not have tendered these sug- 
gestions on the suction of eggs if the venerable lady 
had not encouraged the liberty, but I have no doubt 
you will give a very interesting discourse, and you can 
say with more knowledge of the subject than I possess 
how sound is superior to sense, or rather how it is the 
test of skill in expressing sense, the crystallization being 
move essential to the diamond than the charcoal which 
is the substance. 

" Yours very truly, 

" G. S. Venables." 

" Carlyle is excellent for reading out but with the 
same limitations as to audience which apply to poetry." 

Once when Venables was leaving a dinner party 
where Sir Frederick Pollock also had been, he took 
up his hat in the hall, saying, " Here's my Castor — 
Where's Pollock's ? " Always a favoured guest at the 
Grange, he said at a time when he and the world in 
general were much excited over inland travellers, that 
Mr. Parkyns' book on Africa was the most successful 
attempt on record of a man being able to reduce him- 
self to the savage state. 

Thackeray once said to Mrs. Brookfield of a party 
attheAshburtons', "Venables was there, very shy and 
grand-looking — how kind that man has always been 
to me ! — and a Mr. Simeon of the Isle of Wight, an 
Oxford man, who won my heart by praising certain 
parts of Vanity Fair, which people won't like." 
While Lady Ashburton once said, " I have told 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 355 

Venables it surely is not necessary to enter every 
drawing-room with the feeUngs of Prometheus pre- 
pared to defy the vulture." 

Later on in the following letter Brookfield again 
consulted Venables on the subject of popular methods 
of interesting and instructing the lower middle 
classes : — 

*' My dear Venables, — 

" The chief motive of these lines is the credit that 
reflects upon one who corresponds with Palaces and 
all that therein is. But the secondary excitement is 
that I want to ask you for two or three hints or heads 
upon the advantages which might attend the cultiva- 
tion of a little ornamental literature (having an eye 
chiefly to poetry) in the education provided for the 
less leisured classes — say the artizan class or a little 
higher. Of course I am assuming that Conservative 
as you are you do think such a thing desirable if 
practicable. If you don't — why then the question 
falls. I don't want to impose any troublesome task 
upon you. But if while walking backwards or for- 
wards on the lawn by yourself (supposing that York 
ever allows you to be by yourself) you would bestow 
a few movements of your brain upon me, I should be 
greatly benefited. Could you suggest any book or 
books that would help one in cooking up a lecture of 
popular and amusing character upon the English 
language ? 

*' The cask that contained the wine of those Lys- 
dinam days retains or will retain its fragrance. You 
drove your team admirably well ; and the result was 
really perfection, though such superlatives make one 
pause for a moment to consider their propriety. I 



356 THE CAMBRIDGE '^4P0STLES" 

really don't know how social pleasure could go beyond 
it. I wish you may be as fortunate in the North as 
I was in the South- West. 

*' Ever yours truly, 

" W. H. Brookfield." 

To this Venables, who was staying with the Arch- 
bishop of York, replied : — 

" York, 

'' October 2. 
" My dear Brookfield, — 

** It has happened that I could not write this and 
no other letters till to-day. The one day which might 
have been available we went to Leeds to see the 
Exhibition, and as we came back we didn't come back 
to York, the train taking us through to Scarborough ; 
a saintly Archbishop bellowing out of the window, a 
pious Dr. Vaughan cursing and a Z.C. blessing inside, 
so that day was provided for. 

" There are Lady whom I know and like, and 

Lord Houghton, but he is at Birmingham. He wants 

you to succeed X , but I fear he will scarcely manage 

it. There are two young Greek women here, and there 
is a rich woman called Miss Coutts coming. It is not 
unpleasant. I return to my crust and hollow tree on 
Monday from here. I rather wish you had requested 
more definitely what you want, but I am all for poetry 
as the most de vulgarizing of instruments, and I incline 
to Shakespeare (say King John, Midsummer Night, 
and As you like it) above all other books ; then 
Robinson Crusoe, then Ivanhoe, and Lay of the Last 
Minstrel ; but I have no doubt I could think of details 
if I knew better what you want. A good argument 
and illustration might be taken from the Athenians, 
all of whom heard and cared for the great tragedies 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 357 

in the theatre, being the most cultivated people, all 
through, that ever lived, and the Jews who had the 
Psalms, Isaiah, etc., at their fingers' ends. I should 
proceed with the subject, the only possible equality of 
education, equal in quality to the highest, as it can't 
be in quantity (conceive an average Cambridge man 
in our time, having more education than can be given 
to the lower middle classes), but it is the correct thing 
to assume intellectual sympathy which would relieve 
popular oration from the temptation to be low, etc., 



etc. and etc. 



Yours sincerely, 
'' G. S. Venables." 



" October 9. 
" My dear Brookfield, — 

" In regard of poetry I think you would do well to 
get up Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 
which is quite unequalled as a bit of English history 
showing the similarity and the dissimilarity of things 
500 years ago and things now, and it is also unequalled 
in itself. With the vocabulary which is in all ordinary 
editions you could easily get over all the obsolete 
words, which are not many, and, reading it out with 
modern pronunciation, except when the verse requires 
the sounding of a mute * e,' you would find nothing 
simpler or more intelligible. It is calculated to be, in 
parts of it at least, pre-eminently popular, and it would 
be much newer than Shakespeare. I know nothing 
like it — for the last century ; there are bits of Pope which 
would be very good, and new to most people ; and for 
an earlier time there are very pretty bits of Donne, 
Cowley, Andrew MarveU, etc. I should say Pope's 
Homer, too, which has much more ring than Lord 
Derby's. All which, if irrelevant, excuse. 



358 THE CAMBRIDGE '^APOSTLES" 

" I returned here on Wednesday. I asked Thirl- 
wall, who is coming to open a church, but he is going 
to Llwynmedoc (Mrs. Thomas'). In the latter part of 
Bishopthorpe there were Mr. Henry Holland and Miss 
Coutts. I need hardly say that I proposed to her and 
was accepted, but there is a temporary impediment 
caused by my objection on principle to squander any 
more of my substance on colonial Bishoprics and 
Churches. I see you are not Dean of St. Paul's or 
Bishop of Peterborough. I am afraid the chances 
are against your being Hawkins. 

** Yours ever sincerely, 

" G. Venables." 

Brookfield was always delighted by Venables' re- 
tort when he was asked for Scripture proof against 
bigamy. " No man can serve two masters." It was 
he who said he could not for the life of him under- 
stand what the millennium meant, unless it denoted a 
period when every one would possess a thousand a 
year ! He was always kindly and hospitable, and he 
was ever willing to give genial invitations and sensible 
advice in one breath. 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" I don't think self -blame is generally a recommen- 
dation. What is the use of disinterring a diamond 
if it is only a bit of charcoal ? I wish you were likely 
to be coming here, for I am afraid I am not likely to 
come to Somerby, and I am much in want of assistance 
in drinking, not Maderia of the vintage of Sarepta 
(see Old Testament), for I happen to have none, but a 
proving of port and claret which is beyond my personal 
necessities. I expect Merewether and his wife here 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 359 

to-day ; they will be horribly bored, as it has been dry 
and now rains. If it had rained and was now dry, he 
might probably catch a salmon, which is what he 
comes for — under present circumstances he might 
as well expect to catch a crocodile. Will you present 
my respectful regards to Miss Baring, who, I hope, 
will like her load of visits better than I like solitary 
squireening." 

And another time he said : — 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

" I expect the Master and Mistress of Trinity, and 
Thompson on the 19th, and it would greatly add to 
their satisfaction in the visit if they met a person of 
your well-known attainments, not to say principles. 

When they go I believe K is coming, and even 

K 's company I will not grudge you, though I am 

aware of the danger to me from the competition ! It 
will be provident to announce your train that I may 
send to the station. 

"If you can come about the i6th, I shall be glad to 
know of it ; but if you can't come, then I should be 
glad for reasons not to know of it till the 17th, having 
in fact an interest in using your image in default of 
yourself to propel certain other guests for whose de- 
parture I want to fix a not quite unlimited term. 
Having announced that I am expecting a party who is 
yourself, in the middle of next week, I wish to be still 
expecting and I hope expecting on solid grounds ; 
but if not, then in want of cause to the contrary." 

With a card to Brookfield to a grand dinner in 
Mercer's Hall, Blakesley being Master that year, he 
sent the following, of course as a joke : — 



36o THE CAMBRIDGE "APOSTLES" 

" Sir — 

" I enclose a card of invitation to a dinner of my 
Corporation to-morrow. I am sure your interest in 
the prosperity of the trade with which I have been 
so long connected, will induce you to attend. Speci- 
mens of cloth, silk, flannel, and other mercery goods 
will be handed round between the courses ; the table- 
cloth of my own manufacture. After dinner a collec- 
tion will be made for the heirs and personal repre- 
sentatives of deceased capitalists connected with the 
Company. 

" Your obedient servant, 

** G. S. Venables." 

To Lord Houghton, who was in some alarm about 
some action of Bright' s, Venables once said, " I no 
more believe that political democracy in England will 
be compatible with social aristocracy than I do that 
Colenso is compatible with Christianity." 

Venables told Milnes that his house in Bolton Road 
was the scene of the death of Fred Maurice as well as 
of the reception of Manning into the Catholic Church, 
on which Houghton improvised an inscription to be 
put over the door : — 

Ex HAG HOMO 

Fredericus Maurice 

ad superos 

Henricus Manning 

ad inferos 

Transierunt. 

To Brookfield, Venables said when they were both 
getting older ; — 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 361 

" My dear Brookfield, — 

** Things will change in thirty years. It is a way 
they have. I might say of my eyes as the Miller's 
Daughter's husband says of his wife's eyes, * They 
have not read a many sermons, dear eyes, since first 
you knew them well,' but they have read your sermon, 
and very eloquent and artist-like it is, with the evident 
quality of having been more especially oral before it 
was written, or at least before it was printed. The 
gift of oratorical writing is rather a mystery to me, 
and all the more appreciated. I can more or less both 
write and speak, but I can't write what I am going to 
speak. I can very well see that your style accounts for 
success as a preacher as far as that depends on style. 

" Yours ever, 

" G. S. Venables." 

This was not long before Brookfield died, and when 
the latest development of the Tennyson sonnet on 
his friend was submitted to Venables, he wrote back : — 

" I like the new version best, except the repetition 
of Brooks, which I detest." 

In their Joint Compositions Venables and Lushington 
wrote concerning the incendiary fires at Cambridge in 
1831, at a time when there were rumours of a mob 
advancing upon that town : — 

Some said, "To sack the Colleges 
And some to break the jail." 



At dawn we heard, that night by six 
Nor love nor money purchased sticks. 



362 THE CAMBRIDGE ^^ APOSTLES" 

Quick ranged in numbered bands 

We watched each post and passage straight 

From Jesus to the towered gate 

Where sceptred Edward stands. 



Unto the Poet wise we spoke 

" Is any law of battle broke 

By pouring from afar 

Water or oil or melted lead ? " 

The Poet raised his massive head — 

" Confound the laws of war ! " 

Kinglake said to Mrs. Brookfield, '' Venables had 
romance in his nature, and I know that, Hke most men 
of his high intellect, he had humour, but for years he 
has seemed to me like a brilliant sort of man who had 
unwillingly taken a judgeship. You know him ten 
thousand times better than I do. It is always the true 
woman friend that has the soundest knowledge of a 
man." The great and beautiful attachment of his life 
was to Henry Lushington — from early schoolboy days he 
constituted himself his champion and admirer, and 
he was that unto that dear friend's death. There is 
no doubt but that this group stands unique in their 
unselfish affections. There was first of aU the amalga- 
mated friendship of the whole body of the '* Apostles " 
which is unique in history ; then the secondary and 
closer unions, for most of them chose out of their number 
one to be his bosom friend, and kept him through all 
times and changes, troubles and vicissitudes, — always 
generously submitting his will, always unselfishly help- 
ing his needs. 

When we survey these " Cambridge Apostles," all 



GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES 363 

of them " poets whose thoughts enrich the blood of 
the world/' all of them men of intellect, all of them 
scholars of attainment, all gentlemen " of dignified 
bearing and of independence of mind and nature," each 
worthy of the title of genius, as such proved who chose, 
the beautiful fact remains that that which impresses 
and delights us most is not their marvellous accomplish- 
ment, but the warm and faithful affection they bore for 
one another. Our minds are dazzled by their separate 
achievements, but our hearts are warmed by their 
mutual love. It was the spirit of helping, not of out- 
stripping, each other which stimulated these faithful 
friends on their way. Let those who aspire to emulate 
the members of that early " Conversazione Society " 
strive to cultivate their greatness of soul ere they 
attempt to practise their agility of mind. Arthur 
Hallam was well inspired when he wrote the following 
lines : — 

O ! there is union, and a tie of blood 
With those who speak unto the general mind, 
Poets and sages ! Their high privilege 
Bids them eschew succession's changefulness, 
And, like eternals, equal influence 
Shed on all times and places. 



END. 



Index 



Alford, Dean of Canterbury, i8 
Arcedeckne, Mr., 6i 
Ashburton, Lady, 120 



Barton, Miss, 293 

Blakesley, Joseph William — 
enters Corpus Christi College, 
85 ; a fine classical scholar, 
ih. ; introduced to the Apostles 
by Kemble, 86 ; migrates to 
Trinity, ih. ; takes his degree, 
90 ; a tutor, ih. ; befriends 
Lord Lyttelton, 93 ; interest 
in the Lyttelton election 93- 
97 ; Lord Lyttleton's appre- 
ciation, 99 ; settles at Ware, 
ih. ; marries, 103 ; story of 
the Beadle, 103, 104 ; Master 
of the Mercers' Company, 104 ; 
Edits Herodotus, 105 ; Canon 
of St. Paul's, ih. ; and Dean of 
London, ih. 

Letters : to Brookfield, 94, 
97, 98, ICO, 102, 103, 105 ; 
to Tennyson, 88, 286 ; to 
Trench, 87, 88, 90 ; to Maurice, 
220. 

Boyd, Robert, 291, 292, 297. 

Brookfield, William Henry — 
enters Trinity, 20 ; introduced 



to Monckton Milnes and Mon- 
teith, 21 ; his intellectual 
brilliance, 22 ; his personal 
influence, 23 ; takes his de- 
gree, 29 ; letter from Francis 
Garden, 29 ; assists Lord 
Lyttelton in his candidature 
for the High Stewardship, 31 ; 
his fame as a preacher, 32, 38 ; 
goes to London, 32 ; a favoured 
guest at literary breakfasts, 
33 ; first meeting with Carlyle, 
34 ; dines with Mr. Pawles, 
35 ; a member of the Sterhng 
Club, 36 ; a great conversa- 
tionahst, 36, 37 ; his wit, 39- 
41 ; a delightful letter writer, 
42; friendship with Thackeray, 
55 ; Inspector of Schools, 63 ; 
President of the Cambridge 
Union, 141. 

Letters : to his wife, 43, 44, 
45, 47, 48, 49, 59, 66, 68, 71, 
yy, 271 ; to Carlyle, 78 ; to 
Blakesley, 91, 95, loi ; to 
Miss ElHn, 51 ; to Tennyson, 
25, 27 ; to Hallam, 138, 139 ; 
to Venables, 355. 
Buller, Charles — 10, 13, 18 ; his 
logical and lively disposition, 
107, 108 ; pupil of Carlyle, 



365 



366 



INDEX 



109 ; Carlyle's appreciation 
of him, no ; enters Trinity, 
ih. ', takes his degree, in ; 
connexion with the ApostoHc 
Set, in; Member for Liskeard, 
ih. ; his connexion with the 
housing of pubHc records, 
112, 113 ; his speech on the 
same, 114, 115 ; private secre- 
tary to Lord Durham in 
Canada, 116 ; friendship with 
Monckton Milnes, 117, 118 ; 
hoax at the Queen's Fancy 
Ball, 118, 119 ; friendship with 
Lady Ashburton, 120 ; with 
Thackeray, ih. ; his death, 121 

Cambridge Conversazione So- 
ciety, The, 4 

Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 34, 75, 77, 
109, no, 117, 122, 218, 241, 
246, 274, 288, 307 

Coleridge, S. T., 2, 3, 7, 299 

Clerical Club, The, 59 

Donne, WilHam Bodham ; 135, 

159, 165, 166, 174, 223, 263 
Durham, First Lord, 116 

Ellin, Miss, 5 
Elton, Miss, 102 



Hallam, Arthur, 8, 22, 23, 24 ; 
a poet at nine years old, 121 ; 
at Eton, 124 ; his astonishing 
intellectual brilliance, 124, 125 ; 
goes to Italy, 125 ; remarkable 
knowledge of the Italian lan- 
guage, 125 ; enters Trinity, 
ih. ; his faculties not suitable 
for Cambridge, 127 ; one of 
the embassy to the Oxford 
Union, 128, 129, 130 ; be- 
comes an Apostle, 130 ; his 
fame as a debater, 131 ; joins 
the Spanish Expedition, 132 ; 
disapproval of his father, 133 ; 
unsuccessful attempts for the 
Prize Poem, 133 ; gains the 
College prize for declamation, 
134 ; his literary activity, 135 ; 
goes up the Rhine with Tenny- 
son, 147 ; engagement to 
Emily Tennyson, 152 ; at the 
Bar, 154 ; dies at Vienna, 155. 
Letters : to Brookfield, 24, 
144, 147 ; to Donne, 136 ; 
to Gladstone, 212 ; to Mrs. 
Tennyson, 135, 136, 317 ; to 
Trench and Kemble, 294 ; to 
Venables, 355 

Hare, JuHus, 211 

Heath, Douglas, 12, 19, 310 

, John, 12, 19 



FitzStephen, Sir James, 12 
FitzGerald Edward, 269 
Forster John, 64, 65 



Garden, Francis; 320 
Gladstone, William Ewart, 16, 
125, 126, 212, 224, 270 



Jersey, Lady, 32 



Keats, John, 17 
Kemble, Fanny, 164, 174 
Kemble, John, 10, 12 ; the 

cheeriest of the Apostles, 159 ; 

educated at Bury St. Edmunds, 



INDEX 



367 



ib. ; prints his own newspaper, 
160 ; goes to Cambridge and 
becomes an Apostle, 160 ; a 
fierce debater, 161 ; extremely 
handsome, 162 ; his appre- 
ciation of Tennyson, 163 ; fre- 
quents German Universities, 
163 ; dislike to his sister 
Fanny going on the Stage, 
164 ; acts in Much Ado 
about Nothing, ib. ; friend- 
ship for Donne, 166-168 ; 
takes his degree and goes to 
Germany, 169 ; lured by Ster- 
ling into the Spanish business, 
ib. ; the story of the Spanish 
Grenadiers, 171 ; publishes 
Beowulf, ib. ; gives up the 
idea of going into the Church 
and marries, 174 ; edits The 
Review, iy4; appointedlicenser 
of plays, 180 ; a great Anglo- 
Saxon Scholar, 186 

Letters : to Brookfield, 98, 
180-182, 184 ; to Donne, 175 ; 
to Trench, 167, 172 

Kinglake, A. W., 17, 19 

Kingsley, Charles, 224 

Landor, W. S., 235 
Lushington, Edmund, 192 
Lushington, Henry, 19 ; a bril- 
liant boy, enters Cambridge 
at the age of 17, 188 ; his 
health breaks down, and, to 
his grief, he must leave Cam- 
bridge for two years, 189 ; 
wins the Porson prize, ib. ; 
his opposition to honorary 
degrees, 190 ; friendship for 
Tennyson and Venables, 191 ; 



his excellent essays, 193 ; 
a good critic, 193, 194 ; pub- 
lishes A Great Country's 
Little Wars, 195 ; the catho- 
licity of his interests, 196 ; 
appointed chief secretary to 
the Government of Malta, 
197 ; his affection for Italians, 
198 ; his illness and death, 
199 

Lyttelton, Caroline, 65 

Lyttelton, Lord, 31, 93 



Macaulay, Lord, 121 
Manning, Cardinal, 51, 219 
Maurice, Frederick Denison, 10, 
14, 19 ; a profound thinker 
and hard worker, 201 ; born 
of Unitarian parents, 202 ; 
always a little uncertain of 
himself, 203 ; goes to Trinity, 
ib. ; friendship for Sterling, 
204 ; becomes an Apostle and 
revivifies the Society, 205 ; 
part editor of the Metropolitan 
Quarterly, 206 ; migrates to 
Trinity Hall to study law, 
206 ; takes a first-class in 
civil law, 207 ; unable to 
conform, ib. ; softens towards 
the Church of England, 208 ; 
leaves Cambridge, 209 ; His 
fantastic idea of writing a 
novel with Sterling, 210 ; takes 
over the Athenaeum, ib. ; 
determination to enter the 
Church, 211 ; acquaintance 
with Gladstone, 212, 213 ; 
enters at Exeter College, Ox- 
ford, 211 ; his reluctance to 



368 



INDEX 



sign the thirty-nine articles, 
214 ; publishes Eustace Con- 
way, 216 ; opinion of High 
Churchmen, 217 ; his moral 
and metaphysical philosophy, 
217 ; introduced to Carlyle, 
218 ; his opinion of Manning, 
219 ; his industry, ib. ; his 
opinion of The Record, 221 ; 
excelled in social questions, 
223 ; appointment to the 
chair of moral philosophy at 
Cambridge, 223 ; his fascina- 
tion for the men of his time, 
224 ; a supporter of female 
suffrage, 225 

Letters : to Kemble, 95, 
179 ; to Milnes, 321 
Merivale, Dean, 10, 31, 142 
Milnes, Monckton, 10, 12, 18, 33, 
34, 36, 157, 222, 224; the 
most brilliant luminary of the 
Apostles, 227 ; arrival at Trin- 
ity College, 228 ; a fellow- 
commoner, ib. ; meets Tenny- 
son and Hallam for the first 
time, 229 ; loved advertisement 
and personal investigation, 
230 ; his relations with the 
Apostles, and Blakesley's, 
opinion of him, 231 ; grief 
over the death of Hallam, 
232, 233 ; opinion of the 
poetic faculty, 234 ; his place 
as a poet, 235, 236, 237 ; 
strong Catholic leanings, 238, 
239 ; elected for Pontefract, 
240 ; an indifferent politician, 
241 ; helps bring forward the 
Copyright Bill, 242 ; loved the 
society of the clever and the 
great, 242 ; a Bohemian, 243 ; 



his breakfasts, ib. ; his obiter 
dicta, 245 ; friendship for Car- 
lyle, 246 ; made a peer, 247 ; 
completeness of his charm, 
248; his speech at the marriage, 
249 ; a man of clubs, 250 ; his 
death, ib. 
Montgomery, Robert, 25, 26 
Monteith, Robert, 15, 21 



Niebiihr, 8 

Newman, Cardinal, 51, 53 



Pollock, Sir Frederick, 81, 354 



Radstock, Lord, 222 
Reid, Sir Wemyss, 250 
Ritchie, Mrs., 310 



Spedding, James, 18, 36, 157 ; 
affectionate esteem in which 
he was held, 252 ; The Pope 
amongst the Set, 253 ; a 
favourite correspondent of 
Tennyson's 253 ; a great cor- 
respondent, 254 ; appreciation 
of Arthur and Henry Hallam, 
265 ; gives up the Colonial 
Office ; 269 ; sociable rather 
than convivial, 270 ; a charm- 
ing host, 271 ; a warm admirer 
of Tennyson, 274 ; of Carlyle, 
275 ; a remarkably handsome 
man, 281 ; an enthusiastic 
archer, ib. ; his magnum opus, 
282 



INDEX 



369 



Letters : to Brookfield, 272, 
275, 277 ; to Donne, 254, 257, 
258, 263-265, 266, 267 

Smith, Sydney, 243 

Sterling, Club, The, 36, 301, 304, 

305 
Sterling, John, 13, 14, 163, 
204, 205, 206, 210 ; a striking 
individuality, 283 ; acquaint- 
anceship with Maurice, 284 ; 
absorbed by the Apostles, 
ib. ; settles in London and 
takes to literature, 286 ; takes 
over the Athenaeum, 287 ; the 
Spanish exiles, 288 ; takes up 
cudgels for them, 289, 290 ; 
wins over Boyd to the cause 
of Torrijos, and an expedition 
is formed, 291 ; too ill to 
join it, 292 ; their gunboat 
seized, 292 ; keen disappoint- 
ment at his failure, 293 ; love 
for Miss Barton, afterwards 
his wife, 293 ; the conspirators 
fail in Spain, and his distress, 
296 ; Boyd and Torrijos em- 
bark at Gibraltar, 297 ; they 
are captured and shot, ih. ; 
this catastrophe casts a gloom 
over Sterling's life, 297 ; con- 
templates taking Orders, 298 ; 
a lover of work, 299 ; a con- 
siderable poet, 300 ; founds a 
literary club, 301 ; which is 
called the SterHng Club, 304, 
305 ; Carlyle's opinion of him, 
307 



Letters : to Donne, 301 ; to 
Trench, 285, 292, 295, 334 
Sunderland, 325 

24— (3318) 



Tait, E. W., 224, 225 

Tennyson, Alfred, 7, 18, 229, 
253 ; would have been a great 
man had he never written 
verse, 308 ; goes to Cambridge 
at the same time as Milnes 
and Spedding, 309 ; eccentric, 
310 ; a confirmed smoker, 
311 ; his love for his friends, 
311, 312 ; stimulating influence 
of Brookfield, 312 ; Tennyson 
or Milton — which is the greater 
poet? 313; becomes an Apostle, 
314 ; Poems by Two Brothers, 
315 ; friendship of Arthur 
Hallam for him, 317 ; partici- 
pation in the Spanish plot, 
318 ; fond of dancing, ib. ; 
the Daily Divan, 319 ; the 
death of Hallam a terrible 
blow, 320 ; begins In Memo- 
riam, 321 ; Poet Laureate, 323 ; 
practical side of his nature, 
324 ; sudden attacks of ill- 
humour, 325 ; The Omniana 
Books, 325, 326 ; the stately 
lady reads the ode to Brook- 
field, 328 ; views on religion, 

329 

Letters : to Brookfield, 27, 
338 ; to Milnes, 322 

Thackeray, W. M., 35, 55, 57, 
60, 120 

Thompson, W. H., 142 

Tomlinson, Henry, 4 

Torrijos, 288, 289, 291, 295, 335 

Trench, Richard Chenevix, 10, 
18, 146, 163, 169, 170, 285, 
320 ; distinguished by the 
maturity of his moral quali- 
ties, 331 ; of great help to 
Hallam, 332 ; objects to the 



370 



INDEX 



philosophical investigations of 
his friends, 333 ; first experi- 
ments in literature, ih. ; meets 
Torrijos, and becomes pledged 
to the Spanish scheme, 336 ; 
returns to Cambridge, 338 ; 
ordained, ih. ; publishes his 
poems, 339 ; at Botley Hill, 
340 ; Vicar of Itchenstoke, 
343 ; interested in the poor, 
344 ; on the death of Thack- 
eray, 345 ; a lofty poet, ih 

Letters : to Brookfield, 341, 
342, 345 ; to Donne, 336 ; to 
Kemble, 172, 175 

Venables, George Stovin, 19, 190, 
248 ; early encounter between 
Master Thackeray and Master 



Venables, 347 ; goes to Jesus 
College, 348 ; possessed of 
considerable humour, ib. ; 
fellow of Jesus and called to 
the bar, 349 ; attached to his 
old Apostle friends, 349 ; not 
the George Warrington of 
Pendennis, 350, 361 ; joint 
compositions with Lushing- 
ton, 361 ; attachment for him, 
362 

Letters : to Brookfield, 351, 
356, 357' 358. 359 



Wordsworth, William, 7, 257 
Wordsworth (Master of Trinity) , 

228 
Weld, Cardinal, 232 



William Henry Brookfield, b. 1809, d. 1875. Cambridge, 

1829. H.M. Inspector of Schools. Rector of Somerby, 

1863. Canon of Ealdland, 1866. 
Joseph Henry Blakesley, b. 1808, d. 1885. Cambridge, 

1827. Rector of Ware, 1846. Canon of St. Paul's, 1863. 

Dean of Lincoln, 1872. 
Charles Buller, b. 1806, d. 1848. Cambridge, 1825. 

M.P. for Liskeard, 1829. Judge Advocate, etc. 
Arthur Henry Hallam, b. 1811, d. 1833. Cambridge, 

1828. 
John Mitchell Kemble, b. 1807, d. 1857. Cambridge, 

1825. Anglo-Saxon Lecturer. Examiner of Plays. 
Henry Lushington, b. 1812, d. 1855. Cambridge, 1828. 

Chief Secretary at Malta. 
Frederick Denison Maurice, b. 1805, d. 1872. Cam- 
bridge, 1824. Oxford, 1829. 
Richard Monckton Milnes, b. 1809, d. 1893. Cambridge, 

1827. M.P. for Pontefract, 1837. Received peerage, 

'66 (Baron Houghton). 
James Spedding, b. 1808, d. 1881. Cambridge, 1827. 

Colonial Office. Bacon's Life and Works. 
John Sterling, b. 1806, d. 1844. Cambridge, 1824. 
Alfred Tennyson, b. 1809, d. 1892. Cambridge, 1827. 

Prize Poem, 1829. Laureate, 1850. Peer (Baron 

Tennyson), 1884. 
Richard Chenevix Trench, b. 1807, d. 1886. Cambridge, 

1826. Dean of Westminster, 1857. Archbishop of 
DubUn, 1863. 

George Stovin Venables, b. 1810, d. 1888. Cambridge, 
1829. Queen's Counsel. Parliamentary Bar. 



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